Memo controversy not just about HR – but HR has important role to play
It’s hard for me to find the words to convey how important and heart-wrenching the Google diversity memo crisis is. I hope you’ll take time to grapple with this issue because to get it wrong will hurt us all.
If you “missed the memo,” essentially, a Google employee wrote a letter in August that was critical of the company’s diversity policy and was fired as a result.
The best way to make sense of this emotional issue is to work from the assumption that two things are simultaneously true:
- A worker violated the company’s diversity policy and was fired.
- An employee expressed a dissenting opinion and was fired.
People tend to agree, fervently, with either point one or point two, but the crisis exists because both are true at the same time. No matter how much you believe point one, that doesn’t erase point two. No matter how passionate you are about point two, you have to grapple with the truth of point one.
Having fired someone for expressing dissent (point one notwithstanding), Google has done severe damage to its reputation and to the relationship between genders. Its working environment has even been called a Goolag (a reference to the “gulag” prisons for Soviet dissenters). Of course, if Google had ignored the issue, it would have faced similarly dire outcomes.
Since HR’s job is to help an organization prevent dire outcomes, it needs to get past the headlines. When we see “Engineer writes anti-diversity screed claiming women genetically inferior,” we don’t want to read any further — we know the right (and righteous) answer. The trouble is that the situation is more ambiguous than the headline implies, and we need to apply our best, dispassionate reasoning, to find the right course of action.
What is the right course of action?
I won’t take a side given that both points are simultaneously true. What I will suggest is if Google had approached the issue with some subtlety, rather than trying to make one side or the other wrong, it would have avoided such a disastrous outcome.
It, and we, need to approach such situations as learning opportunities that will bring people closer together, rather than opportunities for one side to obliterate the other.
In this specific case, we have an excellent employee (he got a “Superb Rating,” the highest possible level, and one can just imagine how skilled someone must be to stand out as superb at Google) with no history of causing trouble, who was sincerely trying to think through the complex issues around diversity.
Perhaps he was wrong, perhaps he violated policy, but after the memo, there was a real opportunity to talk it through and, if it was wrong, persuade him as such.
Why didn’t that happen? Because sometimes people fall into a mindset that is deeply committed to punishing oppressors. When they loudly argue, “This is an attack on women,” it’s hard for people in the middle to push back and say, “Let’s talk and learn from what each side feels.”
And here’s the heart-rending problem for most of us. All our lives, we could simply support diversity initiatives without much thought, and be on the side of good. We’ve now reached a point where some diversity initiatives are productive and some push it so far that they are deeply counterproductive.
The ones that push it too far focus on coercion, punishment and blame. The “righteous anger” mindset trains people to be hypersensitive. That angry mindset is bad for business and breeds distrust between groups.
This means a situation like the Google one requires some difficult thinking and careful orchestration to find our way between the disasters of blithely ignoring the issue or brutally crushing dissent.
Those of us in the middle need to realize we can no longer simply accept the loud voices claiming something is sexist or racist are unambiguously on the side of good, nor can we ignore that constant effort is still required to create an inclusive environment.
We in the middle are the vast majority, but we are deeply committed to diversity and inclusion, so any hint that we are racist or sexist hurts us to the core. We have to find the courage to say, “Let’s really talk this through from all sides, let’s use this as a learning opportunity; punishment will make things much worse.”
If we don’t fight for the middle, for a world where different groups can talk and laugh together, then we will split into camps of extremists who have no path forward. That’s why I began by struggling to convey how important this issue is — it’s not just about HR.
What should HR do today? Read the memo itself, then watch a few of the interviews with the author of the memo, James Damore, such as one on YouTube with Bloomberg.
But here’s the important point: Don’t listen with a view of agreeing or disagreeing, to choosing between point one or point two. Listen with a view to how you as a leader would take the people who fervently support Damore and the people who fervently denounce him, and bring them together.
HR’s job is to create that middle ground out of thin air; it’s a difficult job, but the alternative is to end up with two extremist sides each trying to obliterate the other.
That would be the worst outcome of all.
David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research in Toronto. He can be reached at [email protected] or for more information, visit www.creelmanresearch.com.
