As a Leader, What’s Your Responsibility for Diversity and Inclusion? Do You Know Our History?

Four Hundred Years Ago: This week marks four hundred years since the first slave ships arrived on our shores at Point Comfort, now known as Fort Monroe. For an excellent perspective on their journey, listen to the Reveal podcast “Year of Return” .

The Door of No Return: The first slaves left from the “Door of No Return”, one of the slave “castles” on the Africa coast of Ghana where they were sometimes held for months before making the horrible journey across the Atlantic.

Is it Our Problem? There is a raging debate in many circles about whether we should care about something that happened four hundred years ago, and events that those of us who were alive today did not engineer. Yet many descendants of those slaves – some of whom may work for you – want acknowledgment of their history. You may not agree that you should be accountable for slavery, current discrimination or the like, but sheer acknowledgment can go a long way.

What Should You Do?  

Lead Diversity and Inclusion Efforts: As a leader, encourage your organization to participate in diversity and inclusion efforts. Plan training, mentoring, advancement, community outreach efforts, recruitment and retention of employees who may be different in some way from most of your organization.

Stay Open to Feedback About Your Own Leadership: It’s easy to be defensive about our own leadership. Yet those of us who lead people who are different from us frequently need coaching to make sure that we examine our own actions. Are we truly fair and consistent in how we treat those we lead? Have we been open to 360 or other reviews about how we’re perceived? Do we seek out coaching before someone else thinks we should?

Learn More: As a leader, try to take the time to learn more about different cultures, viewpoints and backgrounds of employees and potential employees.