Is Your Company Fighting Racism or Just Virtue-Signaling?

5 signs it might be time to break up with your employer.

Are you single-handedly carrying the weight of anti-racism at your company? Photo by Elias Andres-Jose on Unsplash

These days, every company is building a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program. But they’re not all created equal.

Case in point: a close friend of mine is a leader at a startup founded by white men. The top ten executives are all white, and the top five are all white men. This is nothing new in the start-up world, but in an exciting twist of events, they were acquired by a company known for multi-cultural, global marketing.

So upon the recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the new parent company told her CEO: you gotta get your diversity act together.

“It’s almost like they scanned our internal org chart until they spotted the first person with brown skin and textured hair,” she lamented to me, referring to her recent appointment as one of three leaders on the time-intensive, not-compensated Diversity & Inclusion committee. “But despite several months of working on and presenting our DEI plans, leadership still can barely understand much less implement our ideas. It just feels like they are done talking about it. But I’m still asked to work on it a ton. I’m exhausted.”

Ouch.

You know what I say to that?

Boy, bye.

It’s not easy to break up with your employer.

This advice is a tough pill to swallow during these volatile economic times, where networking beyond your already-existing circles is more challenging than ever. But even if you’re not the next Susan Fowler, who famously left my former employer, Uber, with a Super bowl-worthy mic drop of a blog post, everyone has a tipping point.

After all, you have to draw the line somewhere.

If you feel like you’ve been holding up your end of the deal — single-handedly writing the strategy for your company’s DEI programs, spending dozens of hours interviewing your Black and brown colleagues, for example — it might be time to examine if your company is putting an equal level of effort and skin in the game.

I use the words “break up” rather than “quit” because if you’re like my friend, you’ve probably invested a ton of effort into trying to fix the broken culture you’re a part of. You may have even been invited to have a so-called seat at the table to design a shiny new culture! What an honor!

But, like a bad relationship, the hollow promise of change can lure you in, until that moment where you stumble upon several active Tinder DMs on your partner’s phone. If you feel like you’ve been holding up your end of the deal — single-handedly writing the strategy for your company’s DEI programs, spending dozens of hours interviewing your Black and brown colleagues, for example — it might be time to examine if your company is putting an equal level of effort and skin in the game.

Sometimes you just gotta walk away. Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash

The writing on the wall

How do you know if it’s time to make your exit? Here are some signs your employer might not be ready, willing, or able to level-up their inclusivity game:

1. Nearly 100% of the people working on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives belong to marginalized groups. Asking the groups who are victims of bias to fix the bias is problematic for many reasons. Sure, they’ll have the first-hand view of the harm being done to them, but to fix it, you need accountability and change from those who are generating the bias. If you don’t see white people at the table for any of these conversations, that’s a red flag.
2. Leaders pass up opportunities — or pass the buck to someone else — to show empathy when groups of employees experience trauma. A seasoned Black leader I know shared that he’s asked to write the communications response to the entire organization when yet another Black person is targeted by police. Yikes. If you see leaders skirting away from tough issues completely, or worse: ignoring them, it could be time to cut your losses.
3. You haven’t seen any concrete goals, and results are opaque at best. Does your HR leadership claim that internal data on diversity “can’t be shared”? Have you seen any goals beyond just “representation” — such as equitable pay and inclusive benefits? If there’s a goal to promote more women and people of color, is there a scorecard somewhere that creates more accountability? If you haven’t seen these, ask. How your leaders respond, whether humbly and honestly, or defensively and dismissive, will tell you your answer.
4. Someone declares “mission accomplished” after a couple of menial milestones are achieved. Just because you’ve hired a Chief Diversity Officer doesn’t mean you’ve solved diversity. And just because you fixed the pay equity gap company-wide doesn’t mean you’ve created an equal playing field. It’s likely that the issues you fix in the first three to six months of an anti-racist agenda are just scratching the surface of systemic challenges in your organization. If you see leaders disinvesting their time, it’s because they’re checking out.
5. The company wants to write checks, but not invest leaders’ time. This is one of the harder trends to spot because money and investment do matter. Companies that invest in diverse communities, suppliers, education, and other equity-focused initiatives should be applauded. But if you see leaders writing checks without also investing their time, it might just be virtue-signaling for PR. Sorry.

Finally, if after asking questions about any of these practices, you’re met with denial, gaslighting, or disengagement — that might be the nail in the coffin.

But, like a bad relationship, the hollow promise of change can lure you in, until that moment where you stumble upon several active Tinder DMs on your partner’s phone.

It’s not all bad news.

If you recognize any of these practices at your current organization, that doesn’t mean you have to exit tomorrow or write an exposé on the company’s terrible practices.

Instead, critically evaluate if there is a willingness to change. Your direct manager may not have their finger on the pulse of cultural transformation efforts, so you may need to have conversations with several different leaders.

So before you write off the company as a toxic culture, have these conversations:

• Ask to speak with a leader who is working on our Diversity and Inclusion efforts— If you’re in a marginalized group, a company willing to change to seize this opportunity. A company unwilling might respond with paranoia.
• In that conversation, share honestly, but constructively, how you’d like to see the company improve. For example, “I’ve observed that the company didn’t respond to XYZ event in the news. Many employees were struggling that week, including me. I’d like to see more acknowledgment of our experiences and standing up for our rights.” How was that received? Did you sense a human, empathetic response? If yes, that’s a good sign.
• If you’re invited to shape the company’s DEI strategy, be upfront about your time commitment and compensation challenges. Example: “Thanks for thinking of me for this. I want to partner to solve these issues, but this sounds like a big time commitment. How will this factor into my performance review?”, or, “Is there compensation, recognition, or a promotion associated with the extra time I’ll be putting into these efforts?” A leader worth their salt will pause to realize they’re asking a lot of you. Suggest that they come back to you with a plan if they don’t have an answer on the spot.

Bottom line: see if you can be part of the solution before you walk away. Even better if you’re rewarded for doing so (e.g., through compensation, exposure to the C-suite, or promotion opportunities).

And if it’s truly time to leave, you’ll now know exactly what to look for in your next employer-employee relationship.

Erin Braddock Guthrie writes about anti-racism in the workplace with pragmatic, actionable tips for business leaders and employees alike. You can read her 4-part series on “Why ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ sets the bar too low” starting here. Erin has spent her career in both the public and private sector, working at companies such as Uber, McKinsey, and Amazon.