Multicultural

My friend works for a large Fortune 500 company where her middle manager can’t understand inclusion. She gets excluded from trainings, critical conversations and is rarely informed about daily changes in job functions. Her co-workers face the same plight.

Whose fault is it? According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, companies fail to teach middle managers how to instill psychological safety, voice and trust in their direct reports.

My friend spends her days like a cog on the wheel without feeling included, without being valued, and she will eventually leave.

Western education began with a factory model. The red brick school house taught middle managers overconfidence, rugged individualism and a colonial mentality of taking orders, giving orders, enforcing orders and keeping their eyes on metrics, productivity and the bottom line. Henry Ford accentuated this with his production pipeline that focused more on auto parts assembly than the human being.

Today’s middle manager is sandwiched between a rock and a hard place. Whether you work at McDonald’s or CVS your eyes are glued to metrics and not on the living, breathing human beings working alongside you. How many burgers were delivered in how many minutes, how is the prescription queue moving and how many customers gave us a thumbs up- lame Google reviews matter more than co-workers.

Corporate America has created a culture where middle managers fear metrics like students afraid of cane-welding nuns in Catholic schools.

Meanwhile, an uneasy relationship between human resources and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) groups in companies are making it worse. They rarely train middle managers on empathy, a rare gift these days.

Interestingly, DEI thought leader, Rohini Anand teaches us ways human resources and DEI staff can learn from each other. Perhaps we should come together and teach inclusion to middle managers and retain employees.

Disclaimer

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity with which I have been, am now, or will be affiliated. Further, I make no warranty regarding the accuracy or effectiveness of my recommendations, and readers are advised to consult other advisors as well as their own judgments in making any decisions.