Shownotes

An FT reviewer described the book as having ‘the most refreshing approach to diversity…. So, when Pooja Sachdev co-author of 'Rewire: A Radical Approach to Tackling Diversity and Difference' agreed to be a guest I had a long list of questions for her. It was essential reading for the programme I did at INSEAD on gender diversity and I was fascinated with the essential premise behind the book. 

In this episode Pooja Sachdev talks about taking a broader, braver and more systemic approach to tackling organisational culture and mindset; the six lenses that drive culture and behaviour.

We also explore the knee jerk response in the last year to issues of systemic racial inequalities by organisation and her advise on three things organisations can do to be more inclusive. 

My favourite question was about her reference to HR as ‘Poachers turned gamekeepers’ 

Listen to the full episode here 👇🏾

https://thepurposeroom.org/podcast/

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Memorable passages from interview: 

👉🏾 Thank you very much for having me Sudha it's a pleasure to be here. So my journey, I guess like a lot of people these days, hasn't been a straight line. I see myself, I suppose, as a mix of identities, I've moved countries twice. I've lived in very different parts of the world. As you know, I was born in India. I moved to the States as a teenager to study in Wisconsin. I went to college there for four years, and then I moved to London in 1999. So I've been here a very long time, and I very much see myself as a Londoner. But in my heart, I guess, as a dual home. It's Mumbai and London, and I still have very strong ties with India. I have a sense of roots there. So, I don't know if you had that experience, but you know, you get to that point where you've actually lived away from your country of birth longer than you've lived.... So I've been here over 20 years. So, you know, at that point you have to, I guess, psychologically, you shift a little bit and you create an identity for yourself that's a mixture of the different geographies that have influenced you. So I suppose like a lot of other people, I've got a mixed view of how I see myself and I've kind of journeyed through these three continents through the course of my life. So that's the kind of the personal side. 

👉🏾 On the professional side, I guess my background is in psychology. I studied psychology and education in the States initially I wanted to be a teacher. But when I came to the UK, I realised that I would have to retrain to teach here. So I couldn't afford to do that at that stage. So I took the first job I could get and I ended up working in market research, moved to employee research. And finally, I got really interested in the human side of business and human psychology. What makes us happy at work, what drives motivation, the meaning of work and fulfilment. So I ended up doing a Master's in OccupationalPsychology and my work right now is very broadly in the organisational development space and in between all of that, I also trained as a counsellor as a psychotherapist. So these are the different kind of, I guess milestones, in my career journey and all of those influence the work that I do now. 

👉🏾 And I think you tend to take a different lens on the world when you've got a mixture of identities within you and you've kind of moved countries and you know, also, and it's the same within my career. Like every piece of work that I do, I have a kind of a counselling human psychology lens, but I also have a research and evidence lens as well as the business psychology. So I think it does enrich you personally and professionally to have that you know, like kaleidoscope view.

👉🏾 The very first line in the book is ‘This book was born out of frustration’ and that's really true. I didn't set out to become any kind of diversity specialist. But in all my time working especially on the consultancy side, often got pulled into the D&I projects, the ad hoc D&I stuff that we got from clients, whether it was, a survey on wellbeing or, creating a new question on, race or ethnicity. And as I was drawn into this work and I got a glimpse of how it was being dealt with, I started to get more and more frustrated with how much conversation and how much money and time was being spent on it. But so little progress was being seen. So I'm not saying no progress. But you know, we are seeing small percentage shifts here and there, and those are to be celebrated, but essentially things didn't feel radically different. Right? And the conversations that we seem to be having were very much the same as kind of 10 years before that. And even before that, when I was in college thinking back to, you know, papers that we have written on, you know, affirmative action or whatever, you know, arguing the ethics around that. And you think we're still really having the same conversations just in different words. So I thought that's gotta be, you know, like a better way of doing this, like the way we're seeing change in other areas, you know, like in technology and in other aspects of business, there's gotta be a better way to deal with this issue that is more strategic and where we see, change, sustainable change. 

👉🏾 The basic message is that diversity and inclusion is not just about piecemeal tick box, simplistic procedural things like policies or numbers. It's about a much bigger issue. It's about mindset and it's about culture. It's deeply personal and individual, but it's also systemic. So in order to see sustainable change, we have to take that systemic view. So, what I mean by that is there's no point, for example, you know, just making a tactical list and doing, for example, putting an equal opps statement on your website or writing a new flex working policy. If the mindset of the people within the organisation is not aligned with it. And there's no point setting targets or quotas, you know, we have lots of discussions around targets and quotas, but just setting targets and quotas for certain groups of people, Isn't enough, unless you also work on the environment for factors that will enable those groups to succeed and thrive. So I used to work in the travel industry back in my early days in this country. And so this phrase always stuck with me, you know, there's no point just putting bums on seats. You have to make the experience good for those people. Otherwise, they're not going to be repeat customers right? So the same is true for organisations. So I guess, to sum up the basic premise behind Rewire it is that if we want to see sustainable change in diversity and inclusion, and if we genuinely are working towards it, then we have to take a broader, a braver or more systemic approach, and we have to tackle culture and mindset.

👉🏾 And in fact, that probably answers your question about culture being insidious and hard to kind of pinpoint because that's where we started writing this book. And we said, you know, the basic message is Yes. It should be about culture and mindset. We need to think holistically. We need to look at the system but then we stopped and we said, but what do we mean by culture? What is culture? And how do we get there? How do we get an understanding of what drives culture within organisations to the point where we can start to change it. So in all the research that we did over the couple of years, we started pulling together different factors that we believed influence organisational culture. And we organise it into six broad themes, and this is what we've called the six lenses in the book. So these 6 themes, 3 of them are personal. So they're individual factors, for example, our personal identity. And, you know, we were talking earlier about complex identity and how that identity shapes who we think we are and the decisions that we make and the way we see the world.

👉🏾 It's a lens with which we view the world. Similarly, there are cognitive processes. So the way our brains work, that puts another lens on how we make decisions and judgments about things we see. So in this way, we've kind of mapped out six lenses, three personal and three are organisational. So organisations one's being for example the origins and history of the organisation. Who the founders were, who are the leaders, how leadership is defined, the external context within which the organisation operates and all these six factors influence the thoughts, decisions, and actions that we might take in any given moment and our collective thoughts, decisions and actions is ultimately how our culture manifests. So the six lenses are sort of the six drivers of organisational culture or organisational behaviour in a way. 

👉🏾 I think there is a problem because you don't end up with a neat formula. Even if you do take a look at the six lenses and most organisations, don't. You're not going to end up with a very simple, easy to use formula. And I think that's part of the challenge with this work. You just kind of have to accept and there is complexity organisations are groups of human beings at the end of the day. So even if you do kind of put metrics and formulas in place. It's never going to be an exact science. And I suppose there are other areas within organisational work where you know, we do have a behavioural view and, for example, learning and development and it's not always kind of based on specific metrics, but these are the themes and these help to give you a rounded picture of what might be going on within the organisation. So it helps you to, for example, I use this as a starting point in a lot of my consulting work, because it gives you a framework for where there might be gaps or blind spots. So things you might have missed in terms of your self-knowledge as an organisation.

👉🏾 I think only partially. I would say that organisations tend to be a lot more out of focus in this respect. So what I mean by that is that they often have a much deeper understanding of the customers, how their customers think they have customer segmentation, what customer behaviour is, what the market is doing. And so they have a much deeper in-depth knowledge of customers than they do of their employees. So the inward awareness tends to be a little bit lower in general, not true for all organisations. But broadly speaking, I think the focus tends to often be outward. Now we do have, you know, employee surveys and of course we do employee research. So we have some knowledge, but what I think is that that doesn't always go deep enough.  

👉🏾 In all organisations, there are unspoken norms and practices of how things are done, you know you've been there a little while you kind of figured this stuff out, you know, you figured out who makes decisions and who has power and how to get things done. We all kind of hold this implicit knowledge, but it's rare to see this knowledge become explicit. And I think this is where the power is. This is where we can kind of shift things because that's really how things get done. Right? Cause it doesn't matter what policies you have in place.

Ultimately, everyone kind of knows, this is how you navigate the organisation. You know, this is what you need to speak to, to see things shift. So even where we have you know, organisations might have a cultural or have value statements, maybe on their website, that is normally the polished version, I would say of how the operation works. So they say, we are this, we believe this, you know, I still think there might be elements of truth in that, but it is a polished version. It is essentially the employer brand and that isn't always completely aligned with the actual experience or ways of working.

So I think that's the level that we need to reflect on a little bit more. We need to truly try to understand if we want to shift things and create change in this area.

👉🏾 I always get picked up on that phrase. I mean, obviously, it stands out for people who read the book. And I know that I have a slightly contentious view about the role of HR in driving the D&I agenda. And I also know that that's where D&I mostly sits in organisation. So this, if I keep talking like this, I am going to put myself at risk of losing my job. But you know, I often say this, and this is not a criticism of HR. I consider myself to be an HR professional as well. 

But the few instances where I've seen real change or big leaps in D&I, has been where it has been taken out of the HR function. 

👉🏾 I think there are a number of reasons for this, and I don't think it's a simple solution, but the role of HR has always been in my mind a little bit problematic. There's an inherent conflict of interest, if you want to put it that way, about what the role of HR is there, whether it's there to protect the organisation or to protect the individuals. So I know it's kind of the same thing because you know, the group of individuals makes up the organisation. People don't always see it like that when they're in there. So I had many conversations with colleagues in HR over the years where people talk about HR professionals almost hitting a personal identity crisis at some point in their career because the people who join HR and want to work in HR are often people who care about other people, you know, and have that instinct to look after others, and when you end up working in HR for a long time, you find yourself doing work that isn't always aligned with that value. So it becomes a little bit of an internal conflict in terms of the role of HR and what you're there to do and who you're there to serve. And then there's also the operational side, right? So HR traditionally is there to create and institute policies and processes around people so those are the tools we have in HR. And that's what we tend to default to. So often an issue that's as complex as this that's about mindset and it's about culture. We are too quick to operationalise it. We jump to a tactical solution before we have a clear vision or a strategic overview of what we are trying to do and looking at the different aspects of it.

👉🏾 We are not traditionally very good at taking that strategic overview and having that vision within our nature. We jump straight to kind of what's the solution and that doesn't always serve as well. And I suppose the final thing to say on HR is, you know, yes, HR is responsible for creating the policies around people, but ultimately diversity and inclusion isn't just an HR thing. It manifests in all the little interactions that we have at work. All the micro-decisions that we make every day and HR is not there and all those everyday moments. 

So ultimately it should be something that is seen to be everybody's job, it has to be weaved into what we all do as an organisation, has to be core to how we work. And I think often when it's kind of put into the HR bucket. It's kinda then, you know, as if like the responsibility is passed on to HR and they will deal with that and we will just carry on doing what we always did, you know and it shouldn't be like that. I think it needs to be everybody's job, not just HR. 

👉🏾 Of course, I think that right? I mean I would say that, but I do think that there is power, where there has been a role that either reports into the CEO, the CEO has taken it within their remit. That's where you really kind of see the fundamental shifts happening. So yes, I do think it should be something central that's kind of weaved into the overall strategy of the organisation. And then it seeps into kind of everybody's role. 

👉🏾 So initially when we looked at it, some of the instantaneous responses by individuals and organisations, particularly on social media, the statements that were being made, the big donations that were just suddenly being handed out, you know, the pledges. I probably, I would classify them as knee jerk reactions, and I was to be honest, a little sceptical about a lot of them. And the reason for that is because I felt people were responding to a PR crisis rather than an actual crisis. Right. So they were responding in crisis mode. And what worries me about responding in crisis mode is that what we tend to do as individuals, or as organisations in crisis mode is to do what we have to do to deflect the issue. So you tend to take on the band-aid solution, make that big statement quickly. You just want this crisis to go where you want it to stop. So you push the problem out. 

So an example of that is a big flurry of diversity inclusion roles that have now cropped up. Right? I've never seen so many, in a way, of course it's good that these roles are coming up and organisations are doing something about it. But on the other hand, If I was taking on one of those roles, I'd be a little bit nervous because you're taking on, in a way, the conscious of the whole organisation. Right. It's, you know, it's a problem is being put on your shoulders to deal with. And what I don't want to see is that, okay we have appointed a D&I person, then they will take this on for us few. And the rest of us can just kind of go back to normal and keep doing what we did and that person, or that team is not going to just, you know, take care of this issue for us. 

But having said that I have also seen in the last few months and more recent months and weeks some organisations that are getting to the point of having ridden the kind of the crisis reaction have kind of slowed down and are now responding thoughtfully and strategically and are thinking long-term. So that's very rewarding to see because it's been a painful process. And, obviously this has opened up conversations that have needed to happen for a long time. So I'm very very happy to see that there are companies that are truly taking on the challenge in a genuine way. And I, you know, it is different. I mean, if you think about the protest and if you think about, you know, social media and you think about the time in with COVID being in the house, this is a very unique, unique time. 

👉🏾 I've said to some of our client organisations as well. It's kind of moving from crisis mentality to action planning. This feels very urgent. This feels huge. This feels all-consuming, but it's been huge and it's been urgent for decades. So whether you kind of rush and train all your employees in this workshop next week. Or if you do it in a couple of weeks time, and you give some more thought to it, or in a couple of months time, it's probably not...