The Diversity Training Pitfalls - Under the Magnifying Glass

Don't want a Diversity backlash? Then hire right and engage the services of professionals who know a thing or two about Diversity and its proponents!

A very prominent accounting firm has recently come under fire for its misogynistic diversity training titled Power-Presence-Purpose that it conducted in 2018 with its top-level women executives. By the sounds of it, the training has none of these elements. The firm obviously denies wrongdoing which is a very usual tactic of showing unbridled defensiveness when an organization of repute and especially the one that has been figuring in top D&I indices (Good PR?) hires a company to conduct high-level diversity training without any careful and critical examination of what the content of the program is delivering to its audience. I'm sure this training had a negative impact in addition to inducing diversity fatigue on the hapless women executives by not only reinforcing sexist stereotypes but also letting them believe that the training is an absolute waste of their self-belief.

More @ Read what it says. Its visible effect is definitely a dent on the spirit of diversity and empowerment.

Women have smaller brains, should look fit and avoid talking to men face-to-face: Ernst & Young training

Shameful. Shocking. Stupid. This is how I sum up this Diversity training. In the course of my diversity work, I have come across many companies like these making an absolute mockery of their D&I agendas & training. It's got a lot to do with the folks leading D&I initiatives there. Today Diversity is imperative in the business. Hence, hiring diversity professionals that are tested for their capability is far more essential than just hiring anyone with superficial, quasi and pseudo-diversity credentials and a tick in the diversity box. 

Organizations ought to recruit the right people at the helm of Diversity & Inclusion programs. D&I  has increasingly become a bandwagon that everyone whether qualified or not wants to ride on. With their limited knowledge and capabilities to drive the many complexities of a D&I program, they fall flat, succumb to the leadership that has a limited view and vision of what diversity is and how it ties together with their business strategy not to mention that some organizations recruit Diversity Professionals for mere tokenism or at the worst hire their mirror neurons and the end result is building a monoculture that is ignorant, supremacist and toxic.

So if you are an organization that is really serious about driving diversity in the right format, you must hire the right people who will be driving those initiatives. 

- Amit Anand. diversecustomer@gmail.com