Chief Diversity Officer roles have skyrocketed in the last six years. However, unlike every other C-title, the CDO typically does not report to the CEO. They typically have no budget. And they typically have no headcount to manage. The Chief Diversity Officer is not a serious position. This is obvious to anyone in the role; it’s obvious to the CEO, the board, and other C-suite members. It’s obvious, in fact, to the entire company, who are implicitly told by these facts how seriously they should take the Chief Diversity Officer and their initiatives.
Why would anyone want such a doomed role? Why would political or professional allies support such a role? Likely because they think it’s the most that can be accomplished in the current environment. And why would anyone oppose such a role? Perhaps they see it as fake, or a heavy-handed corporate misstep, or perhaps they fear it.
What neither side has contemplated is that they both might be wrong, and that the the way to tackle the issue of diversity in a diverse society is to try something both more radical and more conservative than a Chief Diversity Officer. The alternative is the induction of new people into the roles of COO, CEO, Chair of the Board. While we’re at it, the induction of new faces into roles like logger, Director of IT, train engineer, and so on, and so on. After a reasonable period, let’s promote the good CDOs to better roles where they can have greater influence, not to mention having their own budget and staff. We can let the poorly-performing CDOs find something else to do, and collectively we can admit that CDOs, like civil unions, were a terrible idea in the first place.
For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase “civil union,” back in the 1980s, long before gay marriage was legal, sometime after Stonewall but before Matthew Shepard, well-intended but ultimately misguided liberals pushed for the idea of a non-marriage marriage for gays. Something separate, but mostly equal. Marriage equality did not seem realistic, but idealists wanted some way for same-sex relationships to be recognized; realists wanted some sort of legal structure in place to allow for things like hospital visits and post-break-up division of assets.
Conservatives, be they political, religious, or cultural, hated the idea. They argued that we had an existing structure to recognize love-based, life-long (or at least long-term) relationships: Marriage. What liberals were asking for was something new, something extra. A structure outside the structure. It begged all sorts of questions, both valid and ridiculous. Could anyone be civil-unioned? Could siblings? Would they get the same tax breaks as a married couple? What about other legal protections, like not having to testify in court against one another? Would they need to do anything to prove they were really civil-unioned, like co-habitate or even kiss at the end of the ceremony?
Liberals uniformly viewed these questions as being in bad faith, but conservatives have always understood something about their fellow citizens, liberal and conservative alike: There are a lot of jerks out there. Progressives can be idealistic to the point of starry-eyed, lacking the pragmatism to realize that there are people who game the system, who constantly poke and prod at the structures that surround us, looking for holes and weaknesses. That’s what makes it dangerous to inject radical change into these structures, and it’s why conservatives work so hard to, well, conserve them.
To be less generous to progressives: What the hell? A civil union? How much of the calculation in this, about fighting to bring about civil unions and not marriage equality, rested on scapegoating conservatives and others who might push back, and how much rested on just not caring enough that gays and lesbians had access to the same basic rights as the rest of society?
“They’re a minority, after all — how much is it really worth pushing for? Why not just take something that’s close enough, good enough to quiet them down, so that we can move on to something more important?” One can hear those questions, implicitly stated by liberals in the civil unions debate, if one is in a less-than-generous mood. One can hear them now, as we ask Blacks and the rest of the minorities to accept their posts of CDO. “Here, take this and run along. The adults would like to get back to adult things.”
One can hear the complaints of conservatives again too — these conservatives are consistent, after all. We have structures for leadership! Why change them? CEO, COO, CFO, Chief of HR or People or whatever. Sure, these things evolve over time, but let’s put it this way — which position would one hundred people take if given the choice between COO and CFO? Probably a toss-up, right? Depending on the organization at a given moment, its size, the relationship with the CEO, either might be ascendant. Okay, now Chief of People and Chief of Diversity? I mean, is it really a choice? A few might pick CDO in all honesty. I’m sure a few people might have picked Civil Union over Marriage, if we asked enough of them. But out of one hundred respondents, ninety-something of them would pick any C-level role over one with, again, no staff, no budget, and no reporting line to the CEO. And of those that do choose the role, many leave again, quickly, citing a lack of resources and support.
As with the civil union debate, those who question things like CDOs are reflexively labeled as problematic by all right-thinking people; and just as with the civil union debate, approximately half the country now believes the other half is at best stupid, and at worse evil, for those questions. And as with civil unions, in the end one half of the country may be wrong about a lot of these issues.
To be clear about my own biases and assumptions: Diversity is a real need, and it extends well beyond the realm of HR. A tech company made a webcam that couldn't see black people, and to this day facial recognition makes an alarming number of errors with dark-skinned people, impacting everything from smartphone unlocking to, predictably, surveillance and policing. That’s not a problem created or solved by HR, but it is one that involves diversity. Pharmaceutical companies made heart medications that caused heart attacks in black men. Another company was able to make a heart drug that worked especially well for black men. This is not something you take to the Chief People Officer.
HR and People heads face significant challenges that, for better or worse, do not involve major failures of scientific research or IT development. However many CDOs report to them, even while Diversity roles go well beyond HR, whether you consider the job role as written or the examples above.
You know what this reminds me of? When American business discovered global business. When we opened our eyes to this world of people around us, and saw them as potential partners and consumers, suddenly lots of things became important. Cultural sensitivity, language, and more came into sharp focus. And in response, businesses and professionals pivoted. We didn’t create Chief Foreign Officers, or the role of Chief of Worldly Awareness. We did one better, by demanding that every CEO become globally literate, and retain good advisors on the subjects they would face. Operations, HR, Finance, and every other role likewise had to step up, to work through global supply chains, international hiring, and the tax, accounting rules, and exchange rates of every nation.
In adapting to global business, there were flubs, like the apocryphal story of the Chevy Nova’s horrible sales in Latin American — “no-va” translating literally as “no-go” in Spanish. Will the parable of the HP webcam and its invisible black people eventually become the Chevy Nova story of this era? Will someone one day make a movie, a corporate psychological thriller in the mode of Rising Sun, only focusing on CDOs instead of Japanese business negotiations? I hear Wesley Snipes could use some work.
Because now here we are, opening our eyes to the demands of diversity in our own domain. Like any good romance, the challenges and opportunities of diversity were right in front of us the entire time. To stretch the analogy, for some individuals of color, many times this has been less a rom-com and more a horror movie, as indeed they’ve been stuck in the house with somebody intent on doing them great harm. There’s great opportunity here for everyone in moving forward, but also a great responsibility to do so.
From top to bottom, from the C suite, to education, to criminal justice reform, there are demands we have to answer collectively. Across the political spectrum, across every demographic, there are people ready to work through these issues and more, if we can find a way to do so together. And when one half of the country responds negatively to a proposed solution, the other half in all humility should remember that time, not so long ago, when we really thought that civil unions were the answer.
The implications of all this go far being the role of CDO. It goes beyond DEI or whatever acronym that corporate HR or higher ed faculty lounges give us next, just as the fight for gay rights went beyond civil unions or marriage equality. It went beyond Stonewall, or Matthew Shepard. In fact, it’s moved us to recognize love, gender, and humanity in forms that many who originally supported civil unions may not then have realized, and I believe it will take us further still. Likewise, the fight for minority rights is about more than Chief Diversity Officers. It’s even about more than George Floyd, though it’s certainly about him, and all the others, those whose names we all know and those whose names are known by few. This fight is about more than black liberation, though it’s about that too.
It’s about humanity, about the humanity in others and the humanity in ourselves. By honoring one, we can only enrich the other.