Leadership diversity is still an ongoing problem and today’s society. Despite the huge growth among minorities in leadership roles, most of these individuals are hell to higher standards. These standard are related to obtaining or maintaining a leadership position, which could be very difficult because of arbitrary set systems and social dominance orientation. It seems that for minority groups from either your gender or ethnicity you have to be best of the best just for a leadership opportunity to surface. In a HBO special about racism, (Rock, 2011) paraphrase about how his dad told him that you can’t beat a white people at anything, but you can knock them out. To further explain he use a scenario that if you were measure on a scale of 1 to 10 and a white person had a 5 and a black person had a 6, the black person still lost despite having the higher numerical value.
As an African American leader myself for an automobile company, I found it very difficult to obtain a supervisory opportunity through the interview process. Now it could be a coincident, but I never obtain a job opening when the interviewer was a white man. Throughout my working career, I only received job opportunities when the interviewer was either women or African American. It just so happen that for my current occupation, I was interviewed by African American man. I believe that my interviewing struggles was due to unconscious as well conscious profiling. In additional to hiring process, I believe that the only reason for being still employed with the company is due to the entire shift managerial staff having the same ethnicity and we are also number 1 and number 2 for our respective departments in the country.
Glass ceiling is another obstacle for minorities to overcome. Glass ceiling normally is created by negatively stereotyping a person abilities. As a result an individual are view as incompetent and is not given challenging work that would lead to recognition of any kind. From my personal experience, I was in a situation where I was the only African manager within an organization and was view inept by most of the organization base from rumors as appose to facts. I know with the election of Barack Obama and CEO’s like Mary T. Barra of General Motors this country making strides in having leadership diversity in the workplace, but we have a long way to go. To paraphrase (Rock, 2011) again just because you let Jackie Robinson in baseball doesn’t make it equal. Baseball was not equal until the 70’s when America began to see bad baseball players. It’s not minority leaders should want to be bad, but have the license to be bad and learn to be great.
References
PSYCH 485. (n.d.). Retrieved from Leader and Diversity Commentary: https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp14/psych485/002/content/13_lesson/02_page.html
Rock, C. (2011, September 30). Retrieved from Chris Rock Explains Some of How Racism (White Supremacy) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3JtV5VnU-s
After reading your post, I had to think about the company I work for. It is large with over 50k people in many countries and there are thousands of leadership positions and executive level positions as well. Of these, I had to do some research; we also do not have a good amount of African Americans or women in those positions. We just hired a new human resources executive and she is African American but it appears living in South Carolina, we have more people of African American decent then I saw in Washington State. I really enjoy working with some managers and executives and at time the African Americans are much better listeners than the Anglo leaders.
Whether it is a subconscious issue or a blatantly oblivious issue the best candidate needs to be chosen regardless of their race or sex. I still think somehow blind interviews should be done for major companies, we already have structured interviews so you now what questions your going to ask as the interviewer so why not do it over the phone or some other way so you cannot see the people. I think this would change our workforces quite a bit as far as race is concerned, maybe not so much with sex.
I can confirm with the company I work for we lack African Americans on our leadership board…Do you know of any other companies other than your own that this is common with?