Institutional Racism and Organizational Effectiveness
You’ve issued a statement affirming that Black lives matter, acknowledged that racism permeates all aspects of American society and recognized that your nonprofit is not immune. Now it’s time to walk your talk—what do you do?
For all nonprofit leaders—and particularly for white leaders—the need to address institutional racism within their organizations can be intimidating. Two elements of this challenge loom particularly large:
The deep connection between institutional racism and organizational culture.
The relationship between institutional racism and constituent-facing impact and effectiveness.
These elements reflect the complexity of combatting organizational racism. But they also suggest a way forward. Changing organizational culture is work that builds on itself—initial successes build skills, buy-in and momentum that can then lead to further successes further down the road. Focusing that change work on aspects that can simultaneously reduce racism and improve effectiveness increases the likelihood that such changes will come to fruition.
Culture Change.
Culture is how an organization operates—how people communicate, how decisions are made, what behaviors are acceptable and not, who has power and who does not. Value statements, policies and procedures are ways in which culture is instilled, but so are peer pressure, gossip and informal understandings of how things get done.
Organizational culture resists change, no matter how dysfunctional it may be. Those who benefit from the status quo are reluctant to adjust. Those who don’t benefit may not be happy, but they’ve adapted; things could always be worse. So successful efforts at organizational culture change require persistence and creativity. Culture change is most likely to occur when.
The change effort is broken down into digestible pieces.
The need for the change is explicitly linked to the impact of the organization’s work.
Incentives and disincentives are realigned to favor change over the status quo.
Leadership assertively and consistently models and champions the desired changes.
Think Twice About Planning.
Conventional wisdom dictates that the first step to making change is a plan that clarifies objectives, time frames and indicators of success. However, when it comes to culture change, a plan (and a planning process) may be of limited value or even counterproductive. Planning will raise issues that may not be ripe for resolution, harden the positions of participants when they need to be flexible and, ultimately, may result in selecting objectives that are either too mild to motivate or too aggressive to seem realistic. A successful planning process would somehow have to overcome the same dysfunctional cultural elements that the plan is intended to change.
Outstanding planners and facilitators are experienced at overcoming these obstacles. Under their guidance, planning can powerfully support the change effort—enabling participants to learn about the issues and one another’s perspectives, introducing approaches and skills to strengthen communication and conflict management, and building consensus for change. But so many things need to go right to get these results that—absent such a facilitator—an organization needs to carefully consider its capacity to develop and implement a useful plan.
Perhaps a Framework Instead?
While a plan is a specific path from here to there, a framework offers a broader view of the landscape, opening up the prospect of numerous possible routes. A useful framework for culture change will break down the larger concept of institutional racism into more manageable pieces. white supremacy culture (“WSC”), by Tema Okun, does just that. WSC is, of course, just one of a broad array of frameworks and tools available to organizations seeking to improve their racial equity. What makes it particularly useful is that almost all of the cultural elements it identifies as contributing to White Supremacy Culture are also limitations on organizational impact and effectiveness.
Of course, the urgency of fighting institutional racism should be motivation enough to take on problematic aspects of organizational culture. But in practice, culture change efforts benefit from access to as broad a range of levers—approaches, tools, motivation—as can be mustered. Obviously, organizations that struggle to even talk about power and equity will also struggle to center change efforts around confronting institutional racism. But even nonprofits that are better able to engage these topics will benefit from linking change to organizational impact. Nonprofits must balance internal considerations with their external commitments to constituents and other stakeholders. Culture change efforts that speaks to both of these simultaneously are thus more powerful—and more likely to succeed.
Building Blocks.
Okun identifies fifteen aspects of organizational culture that can characterize White Supremacy Culture. These aspects vary dramatically in how directly they impact the work of the organization, how significantly they implicate power dynamics, and how resistant they are likely to be to change. This variety means that there are lots of possible ways to get started, at least some of which are likely to be appropriate for your organization. The rest of this article draws from this framework and will be most useful if you review white supremacy culture before continuing.
Each of the aspects discussed below offers realistic opportunities for successes that will also increase skills, confidence and momentum for harder changes down the road. Without early successes, culture change efforts get stuck and fizzle out. The need to focus initially on the feasibility of success means postponing work on more deeply entrenched aspects of culture. Best to begin by addressing aspects of White Supremacy Culture that most closely relate to impact and effectiveness but that don’t explicitly challenge existing power hierarchies. Worry less about what will be required to completely eradicate organizational racism and more about the most promising ways to get started.
Perfectionism values the purported quality of work product over its actual usefulness. It’s not difficult to see how it can adversely impact organizational effectiveness. Perfectionism—
Leads to misallocation of resources, with time and energy spent pursuing perfection instead of being devoted to other more useful purposes.
Results in work product being developed that prioritizes the tastes of internal audiences over the needs of external stakeholders.
Creates bottlenecks by concentrating decision-making in a limited group of arbiters of perfection, often just the ED.
In addition to the antidotes prescribed by Okun:
Make the relationship between perfectionism, resources and impact explicit. Clarify the costs (including the opportunity costs) of perfection.
Lift up work that accomplishes its intended purpose within resource constraints.
As a leader, publicly embrace your mistakes and acknowledge trade-offs (“if we had unlimited resources. . .—but we don’t”).
Emphasize effectiveness and impact in communication, rather than excellence.
Defensiveness. WSC identifies defensiveness primarily as an approach to protecting power by deflecting or invalidating perceived attacks. Electing not to be defensiveness puts that power (and privilege) at risk. The difficulty in changing this aspect is how to minimize that risk while at the same time elevating learning and growth, to the benefit both of individuals and the organization’s work. To do so:
As Okun suggests, approach defensiveness as a weakness, not a strength; focus on the response as the problem, not the challenge.
Emphasize the connection between learning and organizational impact. Frame discussions of mistakes around how they adversely effected important work or decisions.
Defensiveness is less useful when the focus is on how to do better next time rather than on what has already happened. Treat mistakes as learning opportunities, not occasions to assign blame.
Leaders undermine the appeal of staff defensiveness when they embrace personal responsibility for the work of their teams.
Publicize and praise instances of curiosity and learning.
Sense of Urgency. The work of many nonprofits—from hospitals to food pantries to social justice organization—is indisputably urgent. The issue here is how that work is carried out. An unrelenting sense of urgency may be a sign of unclear decision-making, inadequate planning, lack of systems, poor staff management or weak execution. Work cultures characterized by urgency are consumed by the immediate and short term and lack the ability to step back and take a broader view. They can be exhausting and lead to burn-out, which also contributes to reduced effectiveness.
Okun’s antidotes are geared to ensuring sufficient time and resources to accomplish work. But changing this orientation will also benefit from a greater focus on impact:
Consider the ways in which unnecessary urgency and drama interfere with accomplishing objectives.
Reassess planning to determine how well your expectations match reality. How well did you plan for and manage risks?
After an episode of urgency, assess whether the crisis was avoidable. If not, could it nevertheless have been handled in a way that was less stressful? Could better policies and processes have helped reduce the need for urgency next time? Identify patterns and learn from them.
As a leader, take obstacles in stride and avoid creating unnecessary urgency or drama. When urgency is unavoidable, take pains to treat it as an outlier. Take vacations.
Remind your team to pace themselves; to also take their vacations and to participate in team-building and personal activities that contribute to their longer term resiliency.
Either/Or Thinking; Objectivity; Quantity Over Quality. Okun explores each of these aspects separately, but they are all approaches that reduce complexity. Organizations appropriately manage complexity by embracing either/or decision points, establishing shared foundational understanding of the world and utilizing quantitative measures. But as cultural reflexes, these ways of thinking limit capacity to engage with difficult challenges and to think creatively about a full range of solutions. Creative, resilient nonprofits balance these with nonlinear (“out of the box”) thinking, a willingness to reconsider received wisdom, and qualitative measures.
Either/or decisions reduce complexity to a binary choice. This can be valuable when the underlying complexity is minimal, when the volume of choices requires efficiency over individualized consideration, or when delegating decision-making. But “either/or” undermines the ability to address challenges creatively. The forced dichotomy hides a spectrum of viable opportunities. Either/or approaches a problem as a switch, but sometimes conceiving of the problem as a dial or valve allows for more modulated responses.
Objectivity. Within an organization, objectivity takes the form of established norms, beliefs and unquestioned assumptions. Closely connected to either/or thinking, objectivity presumes that there is an underlying truth to every situation and that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. As with either/or thinking, the presumption of objectivity can provide clarity and enable much work to be done efficiently. When nothing is considered as “objective” and everything is subject to debate, it can be very hard to get any work accomplished.
From an organizational culture perspective, the alternative to objectivity is not subjectivity—it’s inquiry. This will make it easier to see how objectivity results in blind spots, preferences the views of those in power, and disfavors information and opinions that don’t align with accepted views. The presumption of objectivity shuts down learning and creativity.
Quantity Over Quality. Quantitative measures enable nonprofits to demonstrate tangible progress, to compare themselves to others doing similar work and to frame both accountability and learning. While these are all valuable, quantitative measures have inherent weaknesses that are often overlooked:
Elevating quantitative measures can obscure what is in fact a qualitative mission, creating a false sense of success—or failure.
Limits to collecting data and subjectivity in analyzing it mean that quantitative conclusions can be significantly less authoritative than they appears.
Quantitative data itself reflects subjective choices about what’s is easy to measure and what’s important.
Quantitive measures are better at informing efficiency than they are in defining effectiveness. Resource decisions based solely on qualitative concerns are unlikely to be responsible, but decisions based on quantitative measures can lead nonprofits to fall short of achieving the impact they strive for.
The antidotes Okun proposes for each of these are primarily focused on building awareness of these biases and increasing the space for alternatives. The goal should not to eliminate any of these aspects, but rather to better enable the organization to engage with complexity, both internally and externally.
Just the Beginning.
WSC identifies additional characteristics, including paternalism, power hoarding, fear of open conflicts and the right to comfort, which address who has power within the organization and how that manifests. Lessons learned and shared successes from navigating the building blocks discussed above can equip your organization to more effectively take on these harder pieces.
The intent here is to empower nonprofits with limited resources and capacities to start down the road of addressing institutional racism. Is this approach indirect? Sure. Does it offer a way to avoid potentially powerful conversations that might result in a deeper shared understanding? No doubt. But rather than a way out, the hope is that this can provide a way in.