What’s your “why” of DEI?
Purpose, motivation, mission, why… Whatever you want to call it, it’s important to connect with your driving force for change.
Why is motivation important?
It’s time to get personal… about our motivations when it comes to being an Ally. You may already be crystal clear on this, and if you, bravo! But for many of us, we find ourselves learning about diversity and inclusion through work, friends or the media, and we start to feel differently about things, but we don’t take time to tune into why.
And… there is a very good reason Simon Sinek said “Start with Why”, so let’s do exactly that.
If we belong to a particularly dominant group in our society, we usually arrive at the inclusion conversations from a few different places. More often than not it’s the influence of our friends, the media or our workplaces that spark something inside us and we want to learn more. But how often do we stop and ask ourselves “why is this important to me?”.
Maybe this feels simple to you. You’re part of a community that knows what it feels like to be marginalised, so you’re already tuned into certain “ists” and “isms”, and you want to be able to show up for other communities too. (Motivated by Direct Personal Experience)
In 2020, the killing of George Floyd sparked global outrage and, and if you’re a white person, this may have been the first time you’d witnessed the brutalities of racism in this way. Or maybe you found yourself confused by the discussion of Black Lives Matter, but you wanted to be able to understand. (Motivated by Situational Experience)
Perhaps a new person joined your team and asked to use the pro-nouns of They/Their when addressing them, if you’re only familiar with the binary genders this may have been a bit strange for you, but none-the-less you knew you want to support them and get it right. (Motivated by Learning Experience)
As a person who is not physically disabled by society, it may have been a shock to you when you learned about the challenges faced by your new partner who has MS and faces barriers to access (both literal and figurative) as they navigate their day to day lives. (Motivated by Indirect Personal Experience)
You might be taking new strides into a leadership position in your organisation, and you know that creating an equitable workplace culture is the right thing to do for your team… (Motivated by Moral Belief)
Or for improving its performance… or the bottom line… (Motivated by Business Impact)
Or your chances of promotion… (Motivated by Personal Gain)
You see, our motivations for allyship comes from a myriad of places. And for each of us it will be different. For me, it was a slow burn, that grew in intensity the more I learned about myself and those around me, and the disadvantages we all experience based upon aspects of who we are.
Allyship is a journey, and it can be rocky at times. Understanding your motivation will help keep you connected to why you started on this path to begin with.
As a manager in my 20’s I experienced discrimination in the form of a perceived lack of experience, simply because of my age. This continued into my 30’s even though I had, by that time, gained experience as not only a people manager, but the leader of multi-million-pound company. There were people who would take one look at me and simply not believe it. This was the start of my motivation in the form of personal experience — “don’t judge a book by its cover”. It also helped me understand that not every person in their 50’s has developed the skills to manage all of life’s situations either, so to be less judgement and more forgiving myself.
As a woman I have always known how it feels to be judged on my appearance first, and my thoughts second. I want to be able to say this made me a better ally to women around me, and that I always championed their voices. And I know I will have tried. But if I’m honest I also know I played into some of the misogynistic stereotypes too. I’ve felt threatened by other women who I felt were better than me, and rather than using our collective strength to help us both succeed there will have been times I made life harder for us both. It is this regret that added another layer of motivation to my personal impact why. Both as a victim of discrimination, and a perpetuator of it. Plus, the personal motivation was starting to shift to a moral one.
Even as my eyes had been opened to the effects of being marginalised, it wasn’t until 2018 when listening to a podcast that, as a white person, I realised the gravity of white skin privilege. After all, I had no other frame of reference when it came to my own experiences. And it’s not like I can’t explain it away with a lack of proximity to People of Colour, 1/3 of my immediate team were Black. I just hadn’t stopped to consider their experiences would be that different to mine. In fact, looking back at my responsibility to them as their manager, it makes it even more shameful. My moral motivation was deepening.
All of these instances of personal impact, on both sides of being both the oppressor and the oppressed, led me to realise my Why was changing.
Personal experience (how it affects me directly) had shown me a pathway to explore other people experienced the things I did. In turn this had given way to a moral belief (doing what is right for people other than me) that was becoming louder and stronger from within me. In fact, courage, connection and justice are all part of my core values.
And my understanding of and connecting with my motivations is what keeps me in my own learning and growth zone when, inevitably, the truth becomes uncomfortable, and I have to face up the facts of how I have been on the wrong side of the experience, argument, or belief.
Because the one thing we can ever truly know, with 100% certainty, is what it is like to be us, and no-one else, up to that point in our lives. Everything else is learning.
Think about it like this; When I was at school, I learned that Pluto was a planet I our solar system. I even remember having to make up a pneumonic for their order in primary school.
- Monday (Mercury)
- Victoria (Venus)
- Eats (Earth)
- Many (Mars)
- Juicy (Jupiter)
- Starfruit (Saturn)
- Under (Uranus)
- Nelsons (Neptune)
- Pole (Pluto — yup, here they are!)
[Feel free to share your own silly versions, there must be loads!]
And yet today, poor Pluto has been relegated to a different classification. So even science, the thing we quote as irrefutable fact, can change its mind when it discovers something new. The same is true for us as people, or beliefs and views can be fixed, until we’re presented with new information.
Remaining connected to why it’s important for us to show up as an Ally to others around us will help us do so with integrity, respect for the other party or parties, and accept feedback when we (undoubtedly) reach the limit of our learning to that point. Also, if we don’t fully understand what is motivating us to step up, step in, or step away, then we can’t protect and care for ourselves when we get picked away at by “dominant group resistance” either (which unfortunately we probably will).
Of course, there are many ways in which you will be personally motivated. The key thing here is that you take the time to connect with your own why, so you know what you need as you continue on your journey.
