Darden Inclusive Leadership Essay: The University of Virginia promotes an inclusive and welcoming environment that embraces the full spectrum of human attributes, perspectives, and disciplines. Diversity stands with ethics, integrity, and academic excellence, as a cornerstone of University culture. Review the University of Virginia’s Commitment to Diversity.
Consistent with this ethos, the Darden School of Business seeks to improve the world by developing and inspiring responsible global leaders. We are committed to developing the School’s ability to leverage our global diversity — the multitude of different experiences and backgrounds among our stakeholders from around the world — to achieve excellence in business education in today’s complex marketplace. We do so in the service of our mission, adhering to an unwavering commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We believe all key stakeholders - students, faculty, staff, alumni - play a critical role in cultivating an inclusive environment, and every action - whether big or small - in service of this goal is important.
Please describe a tangible example that illuminates your experience promoting an inclusive environment and what you would bring to creating a welcoming, global community at Darden. (300 words)
Inclusive leadership is founded on self-awareness and self-evaluation. It requires building a foundation where values of non-discrimination, openness, and addressing biases are ingrained in every decision. It also requires the foresight to spot biases in oneself and in the team.
Explicit biases are easy to spot as these are cultural in nature or propagated by the country where the employer operates or emerging from the hierarchy & power structure in the organization.
The challenging and often interesting narratives are around implicit biases that are so ingrained in the culture that not many people question the assumptions behind the decisions or thinking.
Another theme that always leaves a reviewer inspired is the ‘breaking stereotype’ narratives. Care should be given to not making such revelation a caricature or some clichéd examples that you have seen in Hollywood movies.
The most believable narratives are ones where the applicant understood the challenges of a community or about those who are at a different economic status or on issues promoted by those in the opposite political spectrum.
The narrative can be captured through one polarizing public event, personal interaction, or through a conflict in which you were initially on the other side of the argument.
Most attention should be paid on the transitioning event - the moment when you recognized the bias or fallacy in decision making.
If the ‘realization’ moment is weak, all your narrative will fall apart.
3 Darden Inclusive Leadership Essay Narratives Worth Exploring
1. Unconscious Bias -> Stereotyping
We instinctively categorize people on age, gender, skin color, accent, culture, and weight. The categorization is followed by making general assumptions, mapping the standout attributes to qualities that are stereotypical for that attribute. This is not a flaw in itself but an evolutionary advantage that allowed early humans to separate kin from threats. But as our societies evolved from hunter-gatherer societies to complex cooperative communities around cities, states, and countries, we began assigning new stereotypes about the person.
Studies have shown that we immediately attach stereotypes to people’s depth of knowledge based on the accent of the person. I personally experienced this from a client who was an Asian candidate from one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world – New York. After a lengthy discussion on how to approach his essays, he asked, “how do you know so well how to communicate and write in English.” I quickly changed the topic, but even after 4 years, it still haunts me. So many assumptions people make just based on how you sound. He wasn’t a mean-spirited person.
He was a kind, church-going person.
Just out of curiosity, he asked, but such curiosity arises from flawed assumptions about people from different cultures, countries, and even cities. Primarily because people are not exposed to a diverse group of peers from a young age. A cosmopolitan city doesn’t guarantee the intermingling of cultures if each culture exists in Silos.
The stereotype is worst between North and South. A southern accent is the constant butt of the joke for the slow and nasally affectation. Katherine Kinzler and Jasmine DeJesus in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago led a research study with children 5-6 years of age from Chicago and a group from Tennessee. When played a 3-second audio accompanied by the image of the children, Northern children predominantly chose other Northern children as preferred friends, while kids from Tennessee didn’t show any preference. This is because movies and TV series are overwhelmingly represented by actors from the North or actors from the South without their southern accents. The limited exposure to the accent immediately flags the particular way of delivering as a threat, while the Tennessee kids exposed to both have no particular reason to discriminate.
A simple hiring or standardization practice in movies created such a huge bias on preference, even among children.
There are hundreds of such use cases that lead to discrimination based on age, gender, skin color, culture, and even weight. Finding the nuance of the stereotyping – the cause and effect without making the essay preachy is the trick here.
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2. Team Diversity
Consulting for a large organization and even Fortune 500 companies often requires a quick fix approach to diversity. Some quick fixes are important. For instance, despite all the positioning and virtue signaling, the percentage of women in top MBA programs was in the 35-40% range for the longest time until in 2019-20, schools took a big push to 50-50% representation.
The pandemic reversed the trend as women were the least likely to spend $200,000 on an online or a hybrid format. They are value-conscious. Many run budgets at home. Many had childcare responsibilities. Abandoning the future of the kids for personal goals seemed too selfish. A consultant working on retaining women managers shared a similar finding.
Society has created a huge burden of the ‘motherly’ sacrifice and ‘fatherly’ ownership to other roles in the society where such handle is not required between men and women. The consultant also shared that the reason there has been such slow progress or reversal in progress is that the correction that reformist demand is a switch from one role to the other instead of an incremental push towards the middle.
The middle doesn’t exist in outcome, ideology, or even politics.
The case is similar in team diversity. Most organizations went for a radical push to meet certain numbers without understanding the reason for the low representation.
One of the Sample essays I created was about an African American entrepreneur. He struggled to raise funds for his fashion apparel business despite gaining traction. The funding ecosystem in the American VC community was heavily skewed towards technology companies that were predominantly founded by White Americans, Asians (Chinese and Indians), and Asian Americans. The Chairman of the fund had the foresight to bring the candidate to the committee responsible for defining the search policy. He pointed out that most of his fashion business peers were black. That was an aha moment. The chairman of the fund recognized that they were missing out on a huge talent pool and a niche industry. Kanye West was not just an outlier but an indication of an untapped market.
A top-down approach would have been to start skill-development programs around inner cities on how to code and build a talent pool for the next tech entrepreneur to emerge from the community. Although good in intention, a bottom-up approach helped VCs find talent from the current generation of entrepreneurs instead of waiting 5-10 years for the talent market to evolve in Technology.
They allocated 10% of funds to the fashion and retail industries. The latest cohort for the niche is 85% from the black and LGBTQ communities without any special reservation.
Sometimes Team Diversity is about looking deeper or tweaking the selection process a little bit.
3. Interpreting a foreign culture
Recently, I saw a Twitter thread where a person was asked to share the weirdest tradition. The person shared a practice in Swedish households where the child if visiting a friend’s house, was asked to sit in a separate room while the family had their meals. The child was not invited to the dinner table nor offered a meal.
The Twitterverse went berserk, attacking anyone remotely Swedish. Many acknowledged, many had never experienced this phenomenon, and many rejected the tradition and instead served the guests.
Universally, the tradition was criticized as serving food was the first invitation to experience a culture.
An anthropologist offered an explanation. In Swedish and other Nordic cultures, the harvest lasted for three to four months. The lack of sophisticated food storage in ancient times meant that consuming the scarce resource without account keeping or even sharing them wasn’t part of the culture. Even while designing a welfare state, the monthly payments to those who are in a less privileged position were in direct cash transfer and not in discounted goods and services. The respect for the independence of a family was paramount in the culture. Another reasoning for the unfriendly gesture goes – “it is disrespectful to dictate eating habits for another family”.
The majority of readers didn’t buy the explanation.
No one is going to limit the typecasting to just one context – meals. That is where the challenge comes in inclusive leadership. Some of the practices in a culture might be so alien that it is easy to typecast and assign all negative attributes to that culture. In this case, lacking empathy.
Understanding this incredibly common flaw in how humans think should be the first step in interpreting a foreign culture. Without breaking down each culture’s strengths and weaknesses, especially the strengths that gave the culture unique advantages, leadership lessons could only be sourced from monolithic self-help and management books. This limits from exploring human’s true potential hidden beneath myths, traditions, best practices, strategies, habits, and stories spread across global cultures.
