The Elephant and the Mouse. Laura A. Liswood
full diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. It now must be a core tenet of how leaders behave and how they are measured. Diversity, equity, and inclusion can no longer be seen as “nice to have” but are essential to high‐functioning, successful organizations. A parallel example, given to me by Mason Donovan and Mark Kaplan of the Dagoba Group, might be when a company realizes that “safety first” requires a full reorientation of how it operates and how everyone is responsible for that safety goal.
The Elephant and the Mouse is a callout to all of us to acknowledge that the concepts and realities of diversity, inclusion, and equity are becoming fully embedded in our lives and structures. This requires far more from each of us with concomitant effort and reward.
THE DIVERSITY OF DIVERSITY
The Loudest Duck also outlined the many diversities we find in the workplace, not simply the legally covered or generally assumed ones such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, religion, or age. Diversity is about like to like and like to not like. We discover that there are many ways we separate ourselves from others. In that separation comes a propensity to bond and take seriously those who are like us and to distance ourselves or find reasons to dismiss others who are unlike us, as well as their ideas and even their essential personhood.
There are the smokers and the nonsmokers, introverts and extroverts, tall and short people, folks who are standard weight and those who are nonstandard weight. Introverts think that extroverts talk too much and extroverts think that introverts have nothing to say. There are the Manchester United football fans and the Arsenal fans, both equally passionate and, in their own minds, quite discerning. Parents and non‐parents often live in different worlds from each other, and so too do those who have varying speaking styles.
Different nationalities can create troublesome beliefs and give permission to one group to dismiss the thinking and creativity of the other, thereby defeating what was the original stated rationale for diversity. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explains that 16% of men in the United States are 6 feet or taller, but 57% of Fortune 500 male CEOs are 6 feet or taller, which is four times the cohort!1 I have yet to see research that correlates leadership ability and skeletal structure.
The military has a convenient phrase: “Large and in charge.” We have an image of what a leader looks like. If you fit that image, you have a lot of tailwinds going for you. People will assume you are competent until you prove you are not. If you are shorter than 6 feet tall, you are not going to get that easy advantage. You might be assumed to be incompetent until you prove you are competent. Tall people are more likely to be pushing an open door. Short people find themselves having to demonstrate their abilities more often and more consistently with a different measuring stick.
Without more tools to use to ensure inclusion and equity, the very diversity we say we want can actually cause more problems than homogeneity, which is less compelling but easier to maneuver. For example, many held beliefs—and continue to hold them—about what roles are acceptable and proper for women to play and what roles men should play. The bulk of caregiving and housework globally falls to women and, while that is changing somewhat, men play a much less equal role in care and housework. Some countries have strict laws and cultural norms about these gendered roles. Equality Now, an organization that tracks laws that discriminate against women, found in 2020, for example, that “in 59 countries there are no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and in 18 countries husbands are legally allowed to prevent their wives from working. Meanwhile, 104 countries have laws that prevent women from working in specific jobs, according to U.N. Women.”2
How and where we form beliefs about other people was also explored in The Loudest Duck. All of the ways we learn about people, I called Grandma (society). Thus, we are all diverse and we all unconsciously bring our Grandmas to work with us.
We learn in myriad ways. Our parents teach us, peers put pressure on us, our everyday experiences in life shape us, religion sends messages to us, and the media, TV, film, and social media are playing a bigger and bigger role in how we learn about others. And all those fairy tales, fables, and myths? Those are strong molders of the archetypes we have of others.
I reflected on the great myth of the hero's journey. It is about the young man who has to overcome great odds, slay the dragon, and defeat the evil empire. It looks like he is going to lose to the enemy, but he comes back stronger and overcomes the struggles. He returns to his kingdom, village, or tribe and gets his rewards, which are generally the keys to the kingdom, the pot of gold, and the hand of the fair maiden.
These myths find their way into movies and television. I once read a review of a forgotten, money‐losing 2005 movie called Sahara, directed by Breck Eisner and starring Matthew McConaughey as “an aquatic treasure hunter who halts a worldwide plague, defeats the evil dictator of Mali, locates a fortune in gold and rolls around a pristine beach in the arms of a scientist played by Penelope Cruz.” (At least the woman has a career!)
An equally strong mirror myth is the rescue or rescue me myth. The classic is Cinderella, who is rescued from the evil stepmother by the prince, or Sleeping Beauty who, after lying on a table for 100 years, is awakened by the prince with a (nonconsensual) kiss.
We learn about people unconsciously in so many ways. Movies, fairy tales, and myths depict various archetypes, including the mentor (think Yoda), the orphan (Harry Potter), and the jester or joker (kings often had one to humorously tell them bad news). Generally speaking, men are agents of change and women are waiting to be cared for. Lately, we are seeing more of a mixing in gender, such as Wonder Woman as the hero, but the overwhelming images and archetypes are based on gendered roles. Today, the diversity movement continues to advance, aided by those who understand the moral reasons for change, spurred on by continuing research into the value of diverse organizations, pushed by social justice movements, forced by legal dictates.
Much has changed and yet progress has not been as manifest in the diversity world as it should be, given all of the noise made and efforts that organizations have tried. Diversity has now expanded to diversity, equity, and inclusion, commonly referred to as DEI. It also embraces social justice in its broadened aperture. I have no doubt that 10 years from now there will be further expansion of our understanding and embrace of these concepts.
Unconscious bias training has been seen as an essential part of changing people's mindsets about what views they harbor about others who are different than they are. In my perspective, unconscious bias training has been a ground‐shifting exercise, but has not completed the effort. This training must be added onto with actual practical tools for behavior change, for means to de‐bias both thinking and processes. Awareness does not necessarily lead to shifts in our behaviors.
I remember why I first started thinking about diversity efforts. It began with my interest in women world leaders and a journey to meet and interview women presidents and prime ministers. These interviews were spurred on by the question of what it would take and what it would be like to have a woman president in the United States (as of 2021, still an unanswered question).
After this journey, having met all 15 of the women presidents and prime ministers of the time period between 1993 and 1996, I co‐founded the Council of Women World Leaders, which was originally located at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Every day on my way to the office I would walk by a park dedicated to JFK, where a memorial features a quote etched in stone from Kennedy's 1961 farewell speech to Massachusetts:
When at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment of each one of us, our success or failure in whatever office you hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions:
Were we truly men of courage…?
Were we truly men of dedication…?
Were we truly men of integrity…?
Were