Lessons from my Daughter on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Reading Amy Bass’ opinion piece “Caitlin Clark isn’t the problem. Men like Pat McAfee are” (CNN.com) was the last nudge I needed to write down some thoughts that have been ruminating in my head after a meaningful dinner-time conversation with my daughter.

The Op-ed centers around the idea that male broadcasters and sports pundits – including but not exclusively Pat McAfee – are unable to “extract the women’s side of a sport from the men’s.”

As a 52-year-old man who has spent more than half of my life leading teams and companies, I have to admit the obvious: Bass’ observation is not exclusive to the sports broadcasting sphere.

Here is the problem: being in a position of privilege, power, or authority can make us dogmatic, inflexible, emotionally and intellectually rusty, and biased. This is a terrible combination for effective leadership and positive change.

But we can and should do better. If you’re willing to be humble and vulnerable, letting go of your prejudices, a dinner-time conversation with your teenage daughter can turn into an invaluable source of life and leadership lessons.

How the Dinner-Time Conversation with My Daughter Turned into a Learning Moment

My engagement as a sports fan can be described as “above average”. What I mean is that I don’t follow all sports, leagues, teams and clubs (except MLB, and my Cubbies), but have a general awareness of what’s going on in the most important and major sports: I watched Real Madrid win it’s 15th “orejona” last week, I’m aware that Swiatek won her 4th French Open final… well, you get the idea.

It is not uncommon for me to bring up sports (or have the TV on a sports event) during dinner time. And while I’m typically the “expert voice”, I was left without a reasonable answer for a question that came from my daughter: “Why is the women’s league called WNBA and the men’s league is not called MNBA?”. Her point was, why do we need a disclaimer or gender qualifier for the women’s version of the sport, and not for the men’s? It was essentially the same observation from Bass’ Op-Ed: Why are we unable to extract the women’s side of a sport from the men’s?

As soon as I started my attempt at an answer I realized that I was simply giving excuses: “it would take a lot of money to rebrand the NBA”, “the NBA came before the WNBA”, etc. After a long pause, I gave her my most honest answer “You’re right, it makes no sense”.

While I still don’t have an answer for her, it did inspire some reflections that I now share:

Beware of your Blind Spots

It seems obvious, but the problem with blind spots is precisely that you can’t see them. When we are at the first phase of learning- ‘unconscious incompetence’ – we simply ‘don’t know what we don’t know’.

But how do you find your blind spots if you don’t even know you have them? A reasonable solution is to expose ourselves to people and ideas that are different from ours. This requires us to get out of our intellectual, cultural and emotional comfort zones, and be willing to recognize that our beliefs are not dogmas. We also need to create the conditions for a fluid and honest dialog.

Create a ‘Safe Space’

Jonathan Westover offers a good definition of what a safe space is “(a safe space in a meeting context)… refers to psychological safety - the belief that one can speak up without facing retribution or ridicule” (Human Capital Innovations).

This is easier said than done. I speak from my personal experience: when I’ve been in a position of authority I’ve found myself forgetting that my words, gestures and actions carry more weight than I realize. It’s hard to feel “safe” when your boss (or dad) is present. Jonathan Westover’s articles offer some great tips, some of which I’ve been intuitively adapting, and others that I’ll include in my leadership (and parent) toolkit moving forward.

There’s one additional condition that seems crucial for a safe space to be effective: the meaningful conversations that happen in a safe space need to lead to concrete actions, otherwise they risk becoming meaningless.

Foster a Culture of Collaboration

In his piece included in HBR Guide to Collaborative Teams (Why Collaboration is so Hard), Jeff Weiss asks us to consider three situations that typically come up in our work environment when trying to accomplish a goal:

-       Bringing together various forms of expertise to achieve a goal

-       Combine multiple perspectives

-       Using different ways of thinking and types of experiences

Fostering a culture of collaboration harnesses the power of diverse perspectives by promoting open dialogues. Additionally, fostering a culture of collaboration is essential to making significant progress at work, family, and as a society. To create a culture of collaboration we must embrace diversity, be purposefully inclusive, and treat everyone equitably.

One last word

I think I wrote this article for myself; because I needed to put my thoughts in order and try to make sense to why we need the ‘W’ for the WNBA and not the ‘M’ for the NBA. Hopefully, there’s something of value to you.

But to be true to the lessons I’m learning, I would love it if you left a comment or dropped me a note.