How to Improve Conversations About Diversity at Your Business (Full Q&A)

Do you ever get nervous about accidentally saying something that might offend one of your co-workers? Or misgendering a potential client by using the wrong pronoun? You aren’t alone.

Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, who together run the New York University School of Law’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, have noticed a rising concern among managers in recent years: saying the wrong thing. In their new book, Say The Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity and Justice, they guide business leaders through tough modern conversations.

Yoshino shared some advice with b. on how to build an inclusive culture — and how to talk about it.

b.: How did you first get started with this book?

Yoshino: At the Meltzer Center here at NYU Law, we do a lot of work with organizations — and in the past four or five years, we heard a rising drumbeat of one particular concern among managers and the organizations that we work with. We’ve worked with Microsoft, we’ve worked with Disney, we’ve worked with a huge number of large organizations. The dominant fear was, “I’m terrified that I’m going to say the wrong thing.”

This became a kind of impediment, as we saw it, to people doing anything at all, because if you step in and you hurt someone you care about or if you risk getting canceled yourself, then you’re just gonna sit it out. That, of course, deprives people of the allyship that they need to move forward.

We tasked ourselves with writing this book in order to sort of meet that fear and to provide guardrails around how people can behave in these conversations so that they can intervene and do the right thing without worrying that they’re going to say the wrong thing.

b.: Both of you were very transparent about the mistakes you’ve made and how you haven’t always said the right thing. Can you further explain this message in the book that there’s always room for growth?

Yoshino: We need to let go of this idea of we’re “good” [or] “bad” people. Going back to the dynamic that we were talking about earlier, it’s a little bit strange that people can simultaneously feel confident that they’re really good people and at the same time be completely terrified of saying the wrong thing.

I think the way that we thread the needle is to say both things are true. You probably are a good person and you probably will make mistakes. These binary terms of either being good or bad is really dangerous because if you don’t make a mistake, as a good person, you’re complacent. If you do make a mistake, you fight your corner because they’re really worried about getting pushed into the bad person category. We’ve introduced this idea that we’re all on this journey together, people are inevitably going to make mistakes in this area, and those mistakes are integral to our learning and growth. Then, you can actually have the paradigm shift that we think will push people to participate more in these conversations.

I will say — just in the name of honesty and thank you for seeing us so clearly in the book — that we did have some soul-searching to do. Like, if we’re gonna give this advice and say everyone makes mistakes, we have to do that ourselves. We need to ante up times that are frankly deeply embarrassing to both of us. It was a push for us to do that, but we really felt like we had to do that in order to maintain our credibility with readers, who would be like, “If you really believe that everyone makes mistakes, then why are you being so quiet about the mistakes that you made?” And so we pushed ourselves to do that.

b.: What are some of the ways you think we can all be more open about living up to our mistakes in the name of being better? Especially within the hypersensitive social media world that we live in now.

Yoshino: On an individual level, it means having compassion for yourself. One of the things that we noticed is the way that people talk to themselves can be incredibly punitive. Oftentimes, we feel like if we make a mistake in this area of diversity and inclusion, then suddenly we’re a homophobe, racist or sexist. The stakes seem a lot higher. I get why people are nervous about this, but unless we are able to have a more compassionate attitude toward ourselves, we’re not going to really grow.

In the same way, it’d be nonsensical for me to say, “I want to learn constitutional law, but I’m not going to make any mistakes.” So it’d be nonsensical to say, “I’m gonna grow in the area of D&I, but I’m not going to let myself make any mistakes.” In a weird way, we oftentimes pit compassion against accountability. We don’t want to let ourselves off the hook, and that’s very laudable, except that we don’t regard compassion and accountability to be at odds with each other. In fact, having that kind of self-compassion that says “I allow myself to make mistakes” is going to allow us to grow past that.

To your point, you can have all the compassion towards yourself in the world, and you’re not going to change social media culture. We’re actually developing an op-ed, right, that’s very much in the ethos of the book, which is to hit the pause button on cancel culture, which I think has gotten completely out of hand, and to move from what we call a cancel culture to what we call a coaching culture. Instead of being canceled or ostracized when you make a mistake, people would come in and coach you to get better by giving you practical tools.

The bit in the book where we talk most about that is the last chapter, a substantive chapter about principle seven, the importance of being generous to the source. This is actually the most controversial part of our work, because people are like, “Why on earth should we expend any bandwidth on the source who is a bad actor in this scenario? All of our concerns should be directed towards the affected person.” Our answer was you should be an ally to the source of noninclusive behavior because someday that’s gonna be you. Instead of stewing in your office or staring up at the ceiling in your bed at night, you’re gonna get a knock on the door, or the text that says, “That wasn’t great, but I’m on this journey too. Can I help you rehabilitate yourself or grow past this mistake?”

b.: Do you think there would be more allies in this space if people started to adopt this idea of coaching culture?

Yoshino: One hundred percent. In our experience, if you talk to people who are diehard opponents of diversity and inclusion, more often than not, it’s that they’ve had a terrible experience where they’ve been canceled or someone has engaged with them in an overly punitive way. So obviously, I’m not losing any sleep over Harvey Weinstein or other people deserving to get canceled, but if the only thing that you have is this elephant gun, you’re gonna blow away a lot of mice. It’s just gotten way too disproportionate in terms of how punitive the culture is. If you talk to the individuals who have turned on D&I, more often than not, they can tell you some kind of villain origin story where someone came down on them too hard or unfairly. That can turn them from either being neutral or even positively inclined toward D&I to actually being very negative.

So, one of the things that we’re trying to push in this book is this idea that even if you are a staunch advocate of diversity and inclusion and you’re a progressive and trying to push progressive values, you should really be careful about cancel culture because it’s going to drive away your most natural allies. People who would otherwise be right there shoulder to shoulder with you are gonna get alienated, right, by this overly punitive culture.

b.: Do you think people are sometimes more nervous about this than they should be? It’s really about how you handle yourself after making a mistake, and the anxiety that comes with that could actually lead to you making misguided decisions.

Yoshino: Exactly. We try to be really practical about it. The middle chapters about disagreements and apologies, principles four and five, are really an attempt to highlight why conflict comes up in conversations. What are you actually trying to accomplish? Sometimes, you genuinely disagree … on these issues. Organizations should be trying to build cultures where respectful disagreement is possible. I think too often people lack that linguistic conscientiousness to understand how their words are landing.

Hypothetically, I could go in and say I oppose affirmative action and argue that as a matter of policy, but from the perspective of somebody who’s in the organization and is a beneficiary of affirmative action, they’re at a different point on what we call the controversy scale. You’re arguing it as a matter of values and policies, but they’re experiencing it as “you don’t belong in this organization.” Therefore, they can view it as a strike to their equal humanity. So with disagreements, make sure that you at least acknowledge where the other person is on this disagreement spectrum.

Inevitably, there are other times when you totally mess up and you need to apologize. As you said, our instinct is to both apologize but also protect ourselves. When you try to split the difference in an apology, it doesn’t serve the act of genuinely apologizing or the act of protecting yourself. The threshold question for us is, “Do you have an agreement or a disagreement?” Or do you have an apology that you need to make right? We’d much rather have people respectfully disagree than to have them inauthentically apologize. If you decide that you want to apologize, make sure that you don’t engage in those unforced errors that we all engage in when we’re trying to apologize and protect ourselves at the same time. Those include phrases like “if I did it, I’m sorry” or “I’m sorry, but,” which tend to undermine the apology because they don’t recognize the harm or take responsibility for it.

b.: How optimistic are you that change is being made?

Yoshino: Incredibly optimistic. I do think that ultimately we are all good-ish people. You have to go back to the 20-60-20 rule, where 20% of people are diehard advocates of D&I, 60% are in the movable middle and then 20% are like adamantly ideologically and immovably opposed to it.

I think that belonging is something that is primal and one of the core human needs. One thing that makes me optimistic is that allyship, which is really the beating heart of this book, is something that immediately everyone gets. No matter what profession you’re in, you get that we don’t really get very far in our own lives and we don’t really have healthy organizations without allyship.

An abridged version of this article first appeared in the b. Newsletter. Subscribe now!