“I’m not overstating it when I say Jason’s talk was possibly life-changing.”

Wait…did they really say that?

Yes, they did.

For the past few months — since my book, Humanly Possible, was published — I’ve been squarely focused on building “brand awareness,” and on doing market research, so that I can match my services and course offerings to what people are looking for and willing to pay for. It’s a long, slow slog. It’s also necessary for building a sustainable business over the long haul.

Then, during some random moment — probably during a run — I recalled how much I’ve always loved public speaking, and I got to thinking: how can I get my name out there as a public speaker? I’ve got a chunky section of my CV devoted to invited talks, plus some stills and videos of a few of my speeches. How could I turn this into a separate line of business, while also expanding my reach and impact?

A few calls and emails later, I was off and running, gathering video clips, photos, and testimonials. That’s when I came across the “life-changing” quote.

The title of that speech was, “From ‘What’s your problem?’ to ‘You make sense’: Building Trust, Empathy, and High Performance in Organizations.” In retrospect it’s quite the mouthful, but it does capture what the talk was about.

It was a keynote address during “Learning Week” at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), in March of 2019. At the time I was directing the Robertson Center for Intercultural Leadership (CIL) at International House UC Berkeley. The opportunity had come my way because our business development manager was a whiz at finding audiences for our work. Specifically, SMUD was looking for speakers on “diversity and inclusion” (which I’m putting in quotation marks because DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — is more common now, as is DEIB, with the “B” standing for “belonging”).

I was a little uncomfortable taking this on. I thought, “Do these folks really need another white guy telling them this and that? Shouldn’t I yield the floor to someone with more marginalized identities, who can teach us about lived experiences many of us haven’t had?”

I talked it through with my team. The consensus was that since SMUD had specifically invited me, I should accept the invitation — while being sure to name my privileged identity early in the speech.

So, I got into drafting mode. My team came together to give it a listen. They gave insightful feedback, which led to a second draft and a second rehearsal. Finally, by the third draft, it felt ready to go.

With all of that context in place, I turn now to sharing the key points from that talk.

My team and I homed in on the following three takeaways:

1. Diversity without inclusion won’t get you far.

2. Trust and empathy? Not easy.

3. Train the brain.

For this post, I’ll just talk about the first one, and go through the others in future posts.

Plenty has been said about “diversity” and “inclusion.” One of my goals in the SMUD talk was to bring a new angle to these two terms, by considering diversity and inclusion through the lens of conflict styles.

Think for a moment about how you approach conflict. Do you tend to put your thoughts directly into words? Or maybe you’ll hedge a bit, or tell a story instead?

Do you use a lot of voice inflection, gestures, and facial expressions? Or not so much?

Basing his research on seminal work by Stella Ting-Toomey, Mitchell Hammer created an assessment called the Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory® (ICS®). The ICS model involves four conflict styles, as shown here:

In this model, your baseline conflict style reflects how directly (vs. indirectly) you communicate, and how restrained or expressive you are in conveying your emotions. Each of the four resulting conflict styles has its own name.

We tend to prefer our own conflict style, and we have some pretty strong ideas, mostly negative, about “those people” with other styles.

Take me. My style is Engagement: direct communication, along with emotional expressiveness. I deeply value authenticity and efficiency in conflict situations: let’s get everything out on the table quickly, including our feelings, so that we can deal with it openly, and move on to resolving whatever we’re disagreeing about.

I’ve tended to view people with a Discussion style as “condescending” and “robotic,” Accommodation as “passive” and “uncaring,” and Dynamic as “passive aggressive” and “unaccountable.” Over time I’ve learned that people with other styles have their own negative views about me (e.g., “loose cannon,” “unpredictable,” “self-absorbed.”)

Where does all the name-calling lead us? Nowhere helpful.

Seminal research by DiStefano and Maznevski (2000) found that teams running on negative stereotypes were, unsurprisingly, the poorest-performing teams. These teams were highly diverse, especially from an international perspective. But because there were low levels of self-awareness about stereotypes, and no mechanisms for recognizing and interrupting stereotypes, these “destroyer” teams didn’t accomplish much of value.

“Equalizer” teams did better. On these teams, negative stereotypes were mostly absent, but so were out-of-the-box ideas. These teams — called “homogenous” not because they lacked diversity, but because they ignored diversity — succumbed to a kind of “group think” that inhibited creativity and innovation.

This calls into question the “truism” that “diverse teams perform better than homogenous teams.” DiStefano and Maznevski’s research found that diverse teams can outperform homogenous teams, but only when the deep differences among team members are well managed through intentional, ongoing processes of (in their terms) mapping, bridging, and integrating. These “creator” teams were the highest-performing of all the teams in their study.

It bears repeating: diverse teams managed poorly perform poorly.

How might we manage differences in a way that leaves everyone feeling like they belong?

Sticking with conflict styles: the first step is to recognize that no style is inherently “better” than any other style. Each style is based on a different way of prioritizing values: group harmony, honor / face, factuality / objective truth, and many others. Even though authenticity and efficiency are the top priority for me, it’s not like I don’t care about group harmony. Of course I care; it’s just less important to me in the heat of the moment. For others, group harmony or other values win out. Connecting to the values behind the behavior can help us understand the “logic” of other conflict styles.

Okay, so, all styles were created equal. Great. Except every culture has its own preferred behaviors and values when it comes to conflict. In the U.S. and in much of northern Europe, emotional restraint and direct communication — the Discussion style — tends to be viewed as the most “professional” way to address conflict. In much of southern Europe and Latin America, Engagement wins. China, Japan, and many parts of East Asia prefer Accommodation. In the Middle East, the Dynamic style is often favored. (To date, little if any research has been conducted on the African continent.)

This does not mean that everyone from these different regions prefers the dominant style. In fact, plenty of people don’t — which leads to challenging workplace dynamics.

For me and my Engagement style, I’ve been told countless times throughout my career that I show too much emotion when tensions rise. Probably the most polite way I’ve been given this feedback was when my boss told me he wanted to see “more dispassion” from me.

As challenging as I’ve found this, I’m lucky: as a cisgender, heterosexual white male, I get a free pass in a lot of other areas, and I never have to worry that an identity group I belong to is being judged wholesale based on my “problematic” behavior.

Returning to the first point of my keynote address at SMUD: diversity without inclusion won’t get you far. What’s likely to happen in a typical U.S. workplace if an African American woman speaks in a direct and emotionally expressive manner, especially in a conflict situation? Not only is she likely to be labeled as “aggressive,” but she’s at risk of suffering dire consequences, from suspension to demotion to termination. Why? Because her conflict style differs from the norm, and because she belongs to an identity group that has long been negatively stereotyped based on the characteristics of her conflict style.

It’s just so easy for power to play out in ways that harm vulnerable groups. Even if an organization looks “diverse,” what’s the day-to-day experience of marginalized people in that organization like? If we just go about our business every day, unaware of differences in conflict styles, and unaware of our own negative stereotypes based on differing conflict styles, we end up perpetuating unjust systems.

Conflict styles are just the tip of the iceberg. Human behavior differs in countless ways, from individual to individual and from culture to culture. Each organization rewards certain behaviors and punishes others. Without awareness, the people most at risk are those whose behaviors differ the most from organizational norms — especially when they belong to marginalized and minoritized populations.

Indeed, diversity without inclusion won’t get you far.

In a future post, I’ll dig into point number two: Trust and empathy? Not easy.

Meanwhile, I invite you to check out my new speaking page. Shoutouts to Becky Robinson for suggesting I create one, to Michiel Den Haerynck for building it, and to Gaby Acosta for significant contributions to the content and design. And if you know anyone who might want to bring me in to give a talk, please drop me a note.

P.S. Please let me know what you think about this blog post. Subscribe to the blog here. More ways to engage on LinkedIn.