Having a diverse workforce in your company is a great thing – if you can keep it.

Employees come from a wider range of backgrounds, genders, generations, and abilities than ever. And that’s good news. Research shows, for example, that companies with higher rates of racial and gender diversity have better financial results.

But their best efforts to hire, develop, and promote people from underrepresented groups, including to the halls of corporate power, don’t always seem to be working. A 2022 Gallup poll said 50% of U.S. workers were disengaged from their jobs – a “quiet quitting” that has given way to “conscious quitting” as many younger workers vote with their feet when they don’t find corporate values in line with their own.

Add the ongoing labor shortages, especially for white collar jobs, that are being driven by the aging workforce, and the picture can appear grim. Companies need to be more inclusive in their work practices and clearer in their values as they compete for fewer workers among a multiethnic, multigenerational population.

Leadership expert Sally Helgesen, author of the best-selling How Women Rise, argues that it’s crucial to find a better way – one that helps everyone in the corporate world succeed for the sake of their personal careers and for the performance of their teams and companies. Her latest book, Rising Together: How We Can Bridge Divides and Create a More Inclusive Workplace, delves into what keeps people who may perceive one another as different from working productively together and enabling everyone to feel they belong and have opportunities to advance. She identifies two culprits that undermine people’s feelings of belonging: emotional triggers that zap goodwill and stymie teamwork and poorly executed unconscious bias training.

Always practical, Helgesen focuses on nurturing the behaviors that foster a sense of shared mission. Listen up, senior leaders: she thinks you’re in an ideal position to help all your people rise.

Sally Helgesen, author of Rising Together: How We Can Bridge Divides and Create a More Inclusive Workplace.

Q: Unconscious bias training has been popular in companies because it can help people become aware of their own latent biases about people and guard against those biases interfering with their decisions. You are not a fan. But don't you need to be aware of your biases in order to change them?

Sally Helgesen: Certainly, I agree with that. But a lot of the unconscious bias training that I've seen and heard about from my clients over the last decade or so does not give people a way to act on the insights they gain into their biases. The “how” or the “what now” is missing.

I'm sure somewhere in the world there are unconscious bias training programs that are more practical than most of those I've seen. But I hear from clients all the time: “We made a huge commitment to unconscious bias training, and it didn't move the needle – either on retention or professional development.”

The other thing is, when it's not done well, it can create an enduring and problematic backlash. It can make some people (often, people who traditionally have been included) feel they can't speak honestly about their perceptions and experiences or that no one wants to hear what they have to say. That has, to some degree, fed resistance to these programs. There are positive things that can come out of being aware of your biases, including the opportunity to avoid them in decision-making, and we do need to be aware of them. But in my experience, it's easier to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think our way into new ways of acting. And bias training is all about what we think.

Q: Other than attending unconscious bias training, what are some ways an executive can become more self-aware about ways they might be negatively affecting others?

Helgesen: I focus a lot on the idea of informally enlisting other people who can tell us the truth – because it's hard to come to awareness of our unconscious assumptions and our behaviors on our own.

This can work in one of two ways. One is to say to a colleague, ideally someone you trust and admire, “You know, I've become aware that I can rub people the wrong way. Like, I'll tell a joke in a meeting and some people look uncomfortable. This is something I would like to get better at, because I feel it could get in the way of my career and undermine my ability to build the relationships that would be helpful to me and our team.”

So then you might ask, “Could you watch me in this meeting and see if there's something I'm doing or some way I'm coming across that could undermine my ability to build relationships? And if you're not comfortable being honest, please let me know. I really want answers.”

A second way is to observe somebody who seems to get the kinds of responses you would like. You can approach them and say, for example, “You know, I've noticed you have a great ability to use humor without making anyone uncomfortable. I'm not as confident about that. Can you give me any pointers?”

Q: How can senior leaders outside of HR help the organization unite as one team?

Helgesen: Let me be clear: I think that what the senior leaders do is ultimately more important than what HR does. HR cannot take a culture that people perceive as noninclusive and turn it into an inclusive one if people are getting a different message from the senior team. Senior leaders, however, do have this capacity. But what matters is what they do, not what they say. My dream goal for Rising Together would be to have senior leaders start taking a more intentional look at how their behaviors impact people throughout the organization and not expect HR to shoulder the load when it comes to building an inclusive culture.

For example, senior leaders might consider: Who did they include in a meeting? How skilled are they at building up people who might feel excluded because they're not in the leadership mainstream or people who are junior and may lack confidence? How good are they at learning about what these people potentially have to offer?

Do they ask the people they manage questions such as: Where would you like this position to lead? Do you have talents you feel you're not using in this position that you would like to use? Are there people who could be helpful to you in either developing those talents or skills or in positioning you for what you think you ultimately might like to do? If there are, they can offer to introduce them.

These are the kinds of things leaders can do. Also, sometimes our biases cause us to overlook people who should be recognized for their work. If you are aware of those biases, you can be inclusive when you nominate people for awards and recognition. That’s a very generous way to be in the world.

Q: Being generous in your interactions with people is one of the big themes that runs through the book. But what do you do with a colleague who seems impervious to norms – for example, the recent case where Don Lemon of CNN said presidential candidate Nikki Haley is “past her prime.” What would you recommend if this happened at a meeting?

Helgesen: Let’s assume a hypothetical situation and look at how somebody might handle that in a way that preserves the solidarity of the team. This would be an ideal moment to say, “I want to ask for clarification here because I don't want to make a presumption. But it sounds to me as if you’re voicing skepticism about me because of my age and my gender. Is that what you are intending?” Usually, the person will walk back his or her statement.

But say you’re too blindsided or too appalled in the moment to come up with this kind of answer. Then you want to go to that person as soon you can and say, “Look, I found what you said in that meeting pretty offensive. I have a feeling that other women and probably men who are my age would have heard it that way. So I wanted to understand: What was that remark based on? You should consider this is not a great way to generate the ‘one team’ approach we're trying to create here.”

Q: Tell me a bit about what triggers are and how to keep them from ruining solidarity.

Helgesen: Triggers are basically people, places, and things that stir an emotional response in us. They are environmental, which means we can’t control them. Triggers get kicked off when someone does something we find unfair, offensive, retrograde, pushy – the list goes on and on.

Again, because triggers lie outside ourselves, we cannot control them. But we can control our responses. It’s optimal to respond to triggers in a way that diffuses the situation rather than making it worse – unless say it’s truly racist or profoundly sexist, in which case it usually amounts to harassment. But if it doesn’t qualify as intolerable, we want to think about whether our response to the emotion that gets stirred up ultimately serves our interests and the interests of our team and our company – and ultimately what we are trying to contribute to the world.

Let’s use an example from the book. A colleague repeats your idea verbatim 10 minutes after you raise it in a meeting. On the surface, it may look as if he’s trying to take credit for your idea. Your instinctive reaction may be to get together with a sympathetic colleague after the meeting and fume.

But a more productive response is to think that he repeated the idea because he was intending to confirm or support what you said. Or that perhaps he didn't hear you. Here’s the thing: even if you don’t believe this positive story, it is helpful to tell it to yourself in order to defuse the situation. It gives you a positive path forward, a way not to get stuck in your own resentment, whereas simply being triggered and complaining to a friend does not.

Another scenario: let’s say you’re bothered by someone who is really good at getting noticed for what they contribute, and you feel that you are not. You might try to make yourself feel better by telling yourself that you’re better than him or her because you’re not always talking about what you did or how terrific you are. So that’s fine, but if you stay stuck in that narrative, you’re going to have very little incentive to learn from that person about how you might become better at positioning yourself by putting a fresh spin on how they do things. For example, if they say, “I had the client eating out of my hand,” you might say, “The client and I have really bonded.”

If you separate out your emotional response, which is dislike of that person, you can take a more strategic approach that will likely be of greater benefit to your development and to the people you work with. Your strategic response is: “Yep, that makes me uncomfortable. But let me see if there's still something valuable I could learn from this person.”

Detachment really serves us in these situations, because when we buy into our triggers, we often end up with a self-serving response. Taking a detached response gives us the ability to write alternate scripts that give a positive interpretation of what someone said or did, so we don't get invested in our idea of what a jerk that person is.

Q: How should leaders manage when they get resistance from people who might think diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts boil down to political correctness?

Helgesen: I would say it's your right to think whatever you want. But we have clear expectations about how our employees should behave.

Here are the guidelines that will help you and your team operate in a collaborative, creative, innovative, harmonious, and functional way. If you have another suggestion about something that can facilitate this goal, I'm eager to hear it; let's have a discussion. But really, this is about the actions that we expect, not about your opinion of them.