Creating an Environment for Success

Many mentors of minority professionals assume that their job begins and ends with the one-on-one relationships they establish with their proteges. This is hardly true. Mentors, especially those at the executive level, must do much more by actively supporting broader efforts and initiatives at their organizations to help cre- ate the conditions that foster the upward mobility of people of color. Specifically, they can do the following:

• Ensure that the pool of people being considered for promotions and key assignments reflects the diversity in the organization.

• Promote executive development workshops and seminars that address racial issues.

• Support in-house minority associations, including networking groups.

• Help colleagues manage their discomfort with race. In a meeting to decide whether someone of color should be promoted, for example, a person can help focus the discussion on the individual’s actual performance while discounting racial issues disguised as legitimate concerns (such as vague criticisms that the managerial style of the minority candidate “doesn’t fit in”).

• Challenge implicit rules, such as those that assume that people who weren’t fast movers early in their careers will never rise to the executive suites.

In conclusion, I should address one of the most insidious implicit rules of all: the two-tournament model. Many companies might be tempted to accept it as an empirical reality. Some might even want to make it policy by tacitly accepting that minorities cannot be fasttracked in their early careers or by formally creating two separate career tournaments—one for whites and one for minorities.

I believe that any acceptance—let alone conscious replication—of the two-tournament system is a mistake. First, it unfairly institutionalizes the “tax” of added time that minorities have to pay as a result of existing racial barriers. As a consequence, a higher standard is set for their participation in the main competition for executive jobs. Second, such a policy would likely result in a number of high-performing and ambitious minorities, before their careers could accelerate. It was beyond the scope of my study to determine exactly how many people of color with executive potential, but I did encounter many executives who were surprised when their best minority talent left “just as good things were about to happen.” Lastly, a two-tournament model could eventually lead to backlash among white plateaued managers who, not realizing that they had been passed over because they were not deemed executive material, become resentful toward the promising minorities taking off.

But I am not advocating a one-tournament system of fast-tracking. After all, it is no accident that people of color haven’t been fast-tracked in the past. One reason is that organizations have been largely ineffective in helping minorities establish relationships with mentors. Thus, artificially placing minority professionals onto a fast track without first changing the underlying process dynamics would set up those individuals for failure. Organizations instead should provide a range of career paths, all uncorrelated with race, that lead to the executive suite. Ideally, this system of movement would allow variation across all groups—people could move at their own speed based on their individual strengths and needs, not their race. Achieving this system, however, would require integrating the principles of opportunity, development, and diversity into the fabric of the organization’s management practices and human resource systems. And an important element in the process would be to identify potential mentors, train them, and ensure that they are paired with promising professionals of color.