Holding a ‘mirror’

I recently facilitated a couple of Awareness and sensitization sessions on Diversity for the top management of leading companies from the financial sector. There were many men and a couple of women leaders in the session.

One of the sensitive questions we are conversing around was what should our essence and the Spirit behind Diversity and Inclusion be. It was really fascinating to see the live play of the masculine and feminine energies. Masculine energy jumped to action, caught the question by the horn and progressed to put a process to solve the same. The feminine energy was totally rattled and upset with what they thought was insensitivity of such a critical question and trying to solve the same without understanding.

My observations were we are uncomfortable to get into depth conversations around subjects which normally are not discussed or which have an ambiguous and nebulous feel to them.

Diversity & Inclusion is an agenda item on most management meetings. Leaders have intellectually mastered the understanding and need of this agenda. In spite of this, we do not see too much change at the ground level.  In my understanding what will bring about radical change is when more and more leaders start relating to the need from the heart and stop rationalising from the head.

This will prompt us to take actions beyond laid out processes as individual human beings who believe and champion the cause.

For this to happen we need to be willing to experiment with our alternate energy and  be brave enough to hold a mirror to our own behaviors and attitudes in relation to our biases both conscious and unconscious.