Report to the Industry: Looking Inward, Going Forward

FOREWARD
By Toni F. Laws
Executive Director, NAMME

"The next frontier for us as a company is inclusion as opposed to diversity – a company where all of our employees and leaders feel included, involved, engaged and excited about our work to make all the world’s consumers’ lives a little bit better every day.

-Richard G. Pease,VP-Human Resources, Proctor & Gamble

In this the fourth in a series of reports that explore the complex issues of diversity, the McCormick Tribune Fellows, a multi-racial, multi-cultural group of accomplished print and broadcast executives, tackle the frontier of inclusion. They look at how differences that may exist because of race/ethnicity, gender and age can affect the full realization of inclusiveness in media companies of today.

As the title Looking Inward, Going Forward reveals, the Fellows take an introspective journey to examine the “stuff” we all bring to the table about ourselves and others, about the groups to which we belong and those we don’t. Faced with the vulnerabilities such journeys evoke, the report spotlights the reality that progress toward inclusion cannot and should not be tasked to whites alone.

Assigned the task of capturing the Fellows’ journey is Keith Woods, author of the three previous McCormick Tribune Fellowship reports: Do We Check It At The Door, Executives of Color: What It Takes To Succeed and Leading the Way: Making Diversity Real. As an experienced journalist and diversity practitioner, Keith brings the Fellows’ insights and perspectives about diversity and inclusion to life in ways that honors their experiences, challenges the status quo and inspires reflection and action.

INTRODUCTION
By Keith Woods

In three previous surveys and reports — Do We Check It At The Door?, Leaders Of Color: What It Takes To Succeed, and Leading The Way: Making Diversity Real — the Fellows were relatively unified in their views, around a common sense of purpose. They spoke with a dominant, if not unanimous voice. But in the 2004 survey, where the definition of victim and perpetrator might change with each new question, consensus was hard to come by.

• Black Fellows were distinctly less optimistic about the future of diversity efforts than were their colleagues.
• Collectively, the Fellows ranked “advancing more people of color up the ranks” as their top priority for diversity’s next agenda. Latinos, though, felt that “preparing for the impact of global diversity on the American workforce” was most important.
• Fellows said that class, education and skin color still determine who is more or less accepted within their racial and ethnic groups.
• Men across the racial and ethnic spectrum overstated the degree to which women felt comfortable in the workplace and believed that women have greater access to key decision-makers than the women thought was available to them.
• The Fellows, across gender lines, were more pessimistic about the next generation’s prospects for success than were a select group of young people surveyed.

Those survey findings foretold a series of difficult conversations at the Fellows’ annual “Fall Forum,” where they lived out the struggles of talking across difference that they have lamented in previous surveys and forums. The Fellows found it hard to explore the differences among them.

"We want to be as much together and keep our issues to ourselves, but demonstrate that we’re a united front," a Fellow said, explaining the difficulty he had with talking about intercultural conflict.

"I think some of that is, ‘Let’s not get into our differences. We need to come forward united.’"

Less contentious were issues regarding the more familiar, historically entrenched problems of diversity.

• More than half of the Fellows thought people of color had equal or greater opportunities to be hired than white people.
• Seventy percent thought people of color have fewer opportunities to advance once hired, and most (52%) thought people of color are less likely to make the same salaries as their white counterparts.
• Asked how they felt about the ability of their news organization to "bridge cultural/racial differences," most said they were less than optimistic. "I believe that most news organizations WANT to do better," a Fellow told researchers, "but don’t necessarily have the wherewithal."

The results of the survey and the Fellows discussions should obliterate the resilient notion that there is a monolithic view held by those at the forefront of diversity work in media organizations. It should discomfit those too willing to assign all the work of personal growth around diversity to white people. And it should underscore the complexity of an effort that demands persistent, thoughtful, creative attention from people who recognize that the diversity landscape – and the challenges embedded in it – is ever-changing.

Given the small number of Fellows in the survey, readers of this report should use the results as a conversation starter, an indicator of what might be true, not as a definitive word. They should be careful not to generalize the findings too broadly, particularly across the racial and ethnic groups. As with each of the previous Fellows reports, this report’s greatest potential lies in its ability to inform, educate and provoke.