Achieving workplace diversity requires white men as full partners

When people ask Bill Proudman what he does for a living, he tells them he is the founder of White Men as Full Diversity Partners. They immediately cock an eyebrow, he says.

Sometimes that ends the conversation, Proudman admits, but sometimes it begins a discussion about helping America's mostly white male executives address one of the biggest social issues of our time that also hits the corporate bottom line.

"We've noticed that in the first five minutes of our conversations, we are getting right into the meat of the work, which is the role of white men," said Proudman, who founded his consultancy more than 20 years ago to help companies deal with unintentional but systemic problems that hurt the careers of women and minorities.

Proudman calls out white men because they dominate the executive ranks, and that's where the power lies. According to Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 book, "Blink," the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are disproportionately over 6 feet tall, physically fit, have deep voices and full heads of hair with a touch of gray.

Appearance and gender appear to matter more than they would like to admit, and when it comes to corporate culture, people who don't fit in that box often feel alienated.

An estimated 2 million professionals and managers quit their jobs every year because they feel mistreated because of their ethnicity or gender, according to a 2007 analysis of exit interviews by the Level Playing Field Institute, a California nonprofit that studies diversity in the workplace. That employee churn costs American businesses $64 billion a year, and $14 billion in lost productivity.

The workers who quit, though, also hurt themselves and their communities when they miss out on promotions and pay raises. At the current pace of economic growth, it will take the African-American and Hispanic communities more than 200 years to accumulate the same amount of wealth as whites, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development and Institute for Policy Studies, which research income inequality.

Companies, though, need look no further than their bottom lines for reasons to address diversity. Research shows that when a workforce becomes too homogenous, the ability to recruit the best workers weakens, and without those workers, selling products to a more diverse consumer base is damaged.

Most white senior executives, however, are gun-shy and quick to share a horror story or two about their experiences trying to address diversity, Proudman explained. That's why they assign dealing with those issues to a middle manager in human resources who is usually a woman, a minority or both.

"I've got people who come in expecting to be blamed, shamed and everything else, because literally that's all they've ever seen around this topic," he told me. "But when we turn diversity over to the African-American woman in HR, and the white guys pat themselves on the back ... it perpetuates the long-standing patterns that disconnect the issue of equity and inclusion from leadership and effectiveness."

Proudman's company has led leadership training for Lockheed Martin, Dell, USAA and NASA, to name a few. Demand for his services is growing along with the civil and political unrest that has spread across the country. His first order of business is to defuse anxieties and establish context.

"For a lot of white men, we don't even know we have a culture because we've never had to step out of it," Proudman said. "But we also tell them that none of this systemic inequity is their personal fault, so we have to somehow get away from feeling personally blamed."

White men can get into trouble, though, when we fail to recognize the problem and pretend that individual differences don't exist or matter.

"The impact of my colorblindness, no matter how well-intentioned, is that I might as well be saying, 'You've got to think like me, act like me, basically be me. You've got to fit in my world,' " Proudman said.

White Men as Full Diversity Partners also helps executives see how old tropes have become convenient excuses for not hiring women, minorities or people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans-gender.

"Inevitably, someone says, 'We don't want to lower standards.' Time out. So you're telling me that white men of a certain height and body type are somehow better at certain kinds of jobs?" Proudman said. "Then there's another construction: 'They are taking my job.' When did you get this notion that it was your job? There's a pathology to how dominant groups have come to believe that since we were always in that role, other people are not qualified."

Smart corporations are facing these issues head-on. Intel is spending $300 million to recruit more women and minorities into the white, male-dominated tech industry.

Executives who continue to consider diversity a regulatory compliance issue are missing out on an opportunity to boost their revenues and profits, not to mention doing the right thing to make our country a better place. True leaders will look at their workforce, gladly ask the hard questions and fix the problems.