Insights to Help You Level Up

I have a 2-year-old Chocolate Lab named Sora. She’s the runt of her litter; short, compact, and dense. I love her to pieces and I’ve taken about 5,000 photos of her. My wife even started her own Instagram account. But as cute and loveable as she is, there’s something different about her: she pees like a male dog.

Recently, I was sitting in the waiting area of a restaurant with a friend when an amiable individual turned to us and started a conversation. This person (who was White) asked my friend, “Where are you from?”

My friend answered, “California.”

To which the person responded, “No, where are you really from?”

Disbelief and grief. These were my two main feelings when I first encountered the news about the recent shootings in Atlanta that took the lives of 8 people, 6 of whom were Asian American. It all felt surreal as I conversed with friends from the Asian American community. In a way, this incident put a spotlight on what has already been happening in America for centuries but accelerated during the pandemic, influenced in part by popular American leaders negatively associating the virus with Asians and calling COVID-19 the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” among other names. While I think it’s long overdue that mass media pays attention to the Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) experience, I’m saddened that it took such a tragic event to put Asians on the front-page news.

Leadership teams of major organizations haven’t historically been diverse, but there is a way to make things better. Diversity in senior leadership teams takes intention, work, and planning. In my previous articles, we examined how retaining underrepresented talent as well as identifying where minority staff aren’t given promotions in your organization are keys to fostering a diverse workplace. However, if you really want the diversity within your organization to flourish, you need to create and implement a clear succession planning strategy so that underrepresented individuals have opportunities to advance all the way through, from entry-level to VP and even extending to C-Suite positions.

As greater numbers of organizations seek to include more ethnically and culturally diverse people in their workforces, it becomes increasingly important to address differences in representation among the various levels of staff and leadership. In my previous article, I shared about the importance of retaining staff from underrepresented communities and looking for “leaks” in the company. Today, we will examine the problem of “clogs” in the leadership pipeline that prevents some employees from moving up in an organization.