Race in the workplace: The 10 most useful places to use race analysis at work

Race analysis is a skill needed when you find yourself in a situation between “For real though?” and “I can’t believe this.” You can find yourself here from a number of situations - trying to influence an incognizant hiring manager who wants to deny a person of color an employment opportunity due to “culture fit.”

Trying to influence a disinclined executive to care more about the BIPOC attrition under their leadership. Or, over a year after the George Floyd-ignited protests thinking, “I don't know what more could happen than what is already happening. If the visibility of Black Lives Matter and police brutality hasn't been enough to bring about our executives' and teammates' empathy, I don't know what else it would take.”

Once we can metabolize the paradoxical feelings of both shock and unsurprise, we can put our heads together to figure out a path forward. And I want to help you as you pave your path.

That's why I created The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership - in it you not only expand your race analysis skills, but practice effective ways to respond to racism at work with more skill, wisdom, muscle, and agility. 

By the end of this post, you’ll learn when to use race analysis skills using ten situations where they are critical for operational integrity. But first, let’s define what I mean by race analysis.

Race analysis involves 5 ways of seeing race in the workplace.

1. Recognizing that some companies’ practices sift and sort who gets advantaged and gridlocked out of opportunities to be hired, promoted, retained, awarded a bonus, believed when they share a grievance, etc.

2. Seeing the organizational practices that arrange people of different racial/ethnic groups into the organization’s hierarchy - who is in the c-suite, the board seats, and the management roles and who is not

3. Discerning how race operates, thinking and sensing beyond race as a category or identity

4. Decoding what makes a process racial

5. Observing how spaces get raced and engaging in a spatial analysis connected to the health of the racial climate of the organization - what some would call climate surveys or measures of organizational health

<<Related: Don't forget to click here to download my free guide on how race moves through the operations of organizations. >>

Knowing when to use race analysis skills is just as important as the skill acquisition itself. 

Here are ten situations where race analysis skills are critical.

1. ER investigations into accusations of discrimination based on race and gender. Sure there’s a process and protocol. But, is the ER process sensitive enough to notice both overt and covert forms of racial discrimination? Are the investigators equipped to see race in all of its forms - explicit, implicit, subtle, flashing, contemporary, traditional?

2. Before managers address feedback about an employee of color, especially when laden with stereotype expectancies and activations. It’s very easy to develop an impression of someone based on interaction and overlook the ways in which racial bias influences cognition.

If you’re a manager who is receiving such feedback be careful to get curious, check the facts, and seek out alternative explanations. For example, if virtually all of the black women in the organization get seen as intimidating, threatening, and unapproachable, stereotyping, projection and distortion are in play, especially when it doesn’t actually fit her temperament or way of being.

When anger is a valid, human response to a circumstance, special attention is necessary to untangle how the angry black woman stereotype may be operating in subjective assessments of Black women employees as "intimidating" or "difficult to work with."

*Please note that these kinds of stereotype-laden subjective assessments can come from one Black woman toward another Black woman.

3. In trainings that focus on security measures where employees over-ask black employees for their badges and proof they work in the building. Believe it or not, this happens too often, and it’s another site of unfairness and criminalization. If the seemingly benign request for a badge emerges in a pattern around Black employees, race analysis serves a function here.

4. In hiring a CEO, CPO, CDO, CFO, and all other executive roles to ensure there’s some race analysis. A significant number of organizations encourage executives to “set the tone from the top” when it comes to DE&I. If “the top” lacks race analysis, the tone-setting is under-informed at best and a train wreck waiting to happen at worse. Let’s avoid putting people in such an awkward position and hire for race analysis skills in executive roles.

And, a person of color placed in these roles does not mean they have acquired astute race analysis expertise. This sort of expertise takes years of study, research, and experience, like other fields and industries. It is not a default skill acquired by merely being a person of color.

If you want more of an in-depth description of race analysis, please read this <<Related post: What is race analysis and why your DEI strategy is higher-caliber with it>> 

5. To understand, interpret, and respond to racial patterns that emerge over time in outcome metrics of staffing, leveling, and organizational placement. It’s not enough to collect or access data. When it’s collected, the expertise to analyze it in a nuanced, comprehensive, and astute way requires race analysis skills. If you're wondering where you can sharpen your race analysis skills, check out The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership.

6. To assess and respond when certain racial/ethnic groups get over-assigned high-performance ratings and other racial/ethnic groups get over-assigned lower performance ratings. If you’re someone who’s able to assess performance evaluation data, this one is for you.

Performance evaluation requires getting curious about meritocracy as an aspiration vs. meritocracy as an actual organizational practice. It's easy to mistake the latter for the former.

7. To assess and respond to data disaggregated by race and its intersections. For all those on data analytics, organizational health, and business insights teams, race analysis skills equip you to make significant contributions with insight, ingenuity, and acuity.

8. Organizational placement of employees by race - is there racial/ethnic niche-ing in certain functions or departments? It’s not something many organizations want to look into, but it’s important to know if the hiring and placement process niches certain racial/ethnic groups in certain levels, functions, or teams and not in others. Subtleties like this allow us to see how a seemingly race-neutral process can turn out to be racial.

9. To analyze drivers of involuntary and voluntary attrition. For those in charge of exit surveys and retention programs, race analysis can help you discern whether there are patterns in attrition by race and its intersections. If so, race analysis aids you in identifying root causes and facilitating a solution-finding process.

10. To assess and respond to the health of your organization’s racial climate. Connected to the point above on attrition, the racial climate may be a factor. In order to assess it, you’ll need race analysis skills to sense, see, and discern.

Whew…You’ve just learned when to use race analysis skills and ten situations where race analysis skills are critical. 

If you liked this post, please share it with a friend. And, download these free guides and workbooks as gifts from me to you. 

Now you know exactly when to use race analysis skills, what about how? I’ve got this <<Related post: How to use race analysis to tackle equity in the workplace for you to read next to help you with that.>> 

I help trailblazing leaders like you, who are stuck between mainstream minutiae and resistance from status quo keepers, pivot organizational systems from unfair to equitable.

When you join The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership, you shift from:

• Risk aversion to fortified, unshakable leadership
• Mainstream generic approaches to unprecedented models for more racially equitable outcomes
• DEI burnout to tenacious healing and growth
• Martyrdom , reactivity, or inaction to honorable gamesmanship
• Misaligned and unclear to found providence
• Being an isolated load bearer to cooperative command

Work with me to expand your leadership capacity in care-curated leadership crucibles, sustained coaching, community, and battle-tested curriculum. If you want help applying these concepts, enroll in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership.