There is a moral panic in some sections of corporate South Africa. This could potentially be put to good use in terms of moving us closer to more inclusive workplace environments. But it all depends on how carefully companies think through their own anxieties.
It takes lots of practise for habits to form. This is true of both good habits and bad habits.
How many smokers would have become addicts if they gave up their self-destructive choice after a coughing fit the first time they put the little cancer stick to their still-healthy mouths?
How many of us who joyously guzzle down gallons of beer every year honestly recall the first sip tasting anything other than k*k?
How many of you self-indulgent long distance runners who chronicle every step of every marathon you train for experienced your first tentative outing on a road as an orgasm-inducing trip?
Habits aren’t singular events.
They are typical ways of behaving that have become routine for you over a period of time.
You might at first have acted clumsily, consciously, and only later on was it all second nature to you. And that is why habits are so hard to reverse too.
Because reversing a habit requires the same kind of patient, clumsy, deliberate and consistent practise and, as you persist over time, it becomes easier, less clumsy, less deliberate and eventually unconscious behaviour.
Which brings me to some useful moral panic by some local firms but have been clumsily responded to.
It’s fair to say that in many ways the first half of this year’s news cycle has been dominated in part by reports of bigotry. The biggest volume of these stories is race-related but discrimination on the basis of sex and gender remains as prevalent.
Other forms of discrimination are less often reported on but no less real, of course. These include discrimination on the basis of accent, place of study, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, place of origin, and so on.
Some companies, realising that unjust and exclusionary organisational cultural norms are simply not acceptable anymore, have started to panic. There is a sudden urgency to be seen to be dealing proactively with differences between employees in the workplace that make for suboptimal work environments. Workshops to try eliminate racism and patriarchy are now all the rage again.
And it’s not that “diversity training” was never done. I know of companies that have been making massive and easy profits doing this kind of work over the past 20 years. But this year has seen a particular anxiety about whether all is well in corporate South Africa.
And of course all is not well and cannot be well because corporate South Africa, just like other sections of our society such as South African universities, is not divorced from the rest of society and its well-known fault lines.
But if the institutional habits, just like our personal habits, are bad habits that have formed over a very long time, then a once-off workshop on “diversity” really isn’t a serious way to undo odious aspects of corporate culture.
Institutional habits are even more difficult to reverse than our personal habits because institutions have often been around for much longer than each one of us have, and institutions are big and complex and harder to get a diagnostic grip on.
The systematic discrimination against women, for example, in the workplace, requires long and difficult examination of the unconscious patriarchal habits that underpin gender inequity.
From talent attraction and retention strategies that silently pick out male-centric traits in prospective employees, to internal assessments for career advancement that index leadership, communication and other skills against male-centric norms, companies often do not recognise the unconscious habits and biases that took root in a firm.
And, as I discovered with several corporate clients this year, us men can be very defensive when the research done inside a company reveals that our achievements are not solely the result of sheer hard work and good genes but structural gender and other forms of discrimination that give us a massive advantage over employees who do not enjoy the same unearned privileges as we do.
But interrogating the myth of meritocracy in corporate South Africa can cause emotional distress for the beneficiaries of discrimination even when these beneficiaries are already at the top of the corporate ladder.
We all want to believe that luck and discrimination do not account in any way for our successes.
Reality differs from this self-indulgent wish. Any company that is serious about responding to anxieties about exclusionary organisational norms must demonstrate that seriousness by rejecting gimmicky once-off workshops aimed simply at ticking off a box that says “diversity training”.
A firm truly committed to a democratic and inclusive workplace must be prepared to work hard to form new institutional habits.