Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the strategy skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com if you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well managed strategy studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And another gift we have for you is McKinsey and BCG winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at F-I-R-M-S consulting.com forward slash resume video, and today we have with us Nilanjana Dasgupta, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts. She’s a leader in research on implicit bias, diversity science and designing interventions to create local culture change. And her passion is to translate science for social good. Nilanjana, welcome.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  01:44

Thank you, Kris. It’s great to be here.

Kris Safarova  01:47

Maybe we could briefly start with talking about your career journey and what led you to become a social psychologist.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  01:54

Sure, sure. So my parents are were a scientist and an engineer. My mother was a scientist, a biologist, actually, and my father was an engineer. And my grandparents were very involved in the Indian Freedom Movement. Worked very closely with Mahatma Gandhi, and my great grandmother was a feminist writer after she became a widow very early in life, actually, during the 1918 influenza epidemic, 100 years before the COVID pandemic. So I think that combination of being raised by a scientist and engineer, and having had the wallpaper of grandparents and great grandparents who were in very active in the freedom movement and writing about gender equality, which At that time, it felt like that’s what all grandparents and great grandparents do. Somehow, in my 20s, came together and I became interested in using science, using evidence, using data, to make the world a better place. So I always was interested in science and interested in understanding, how do you use data and evidence to know what is actually factually true and what is a hunch or an opinion, but you don’t really know whether it is true or not, and I thought I would use it to pursue a career in medicine. But in college, I happened to take classes in neuroscience and psychology, which I didn’t know very much about. And then all of a sudden I was I was just completely taken by this, this, this field of psychology, where you could understand and study and use experiments to test human behavior in a way that you could use experiments to understand the human body, which, to my 18 year old self, was just Mind blowing. So I tried to combine biology and psychology and and then I ultimately realized that it was the human mind that I was most interested in. So that was how I got into social psychology, and it was really the social psychology and social psychology of equality that I was most interested in, and that was really influenced by sort of the generational history that came from my parents, grandparents and great grandmother.

Kris Safarova  04:52

And when you started using experiments to test human behavior, do you remember specific findings that you found that. Particularly stood out for you, and you realize this is so important, and I need to dedicate my life to this.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  05:07

Yeah, I remember, actually really clearly one thing, and this was a time when I was a postdoc in Seattle at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1997 at a time when the it was the research on implicit social cognition was in its infancy, and the assumption at the time was that our implicit attitudes, the attitudes that spontaneously we develop, that that activate in our mind very quickly and and automatically, sort of automatically, that those attitudes and beliefs are some things that come up and are learned very early in life, and that once they are learned, that they would be hard to change. That was the assumption at the time in the in the mid to late 1990s and that just didn’t make any sense to me. But that’s what, what my postdoc advisor, my PhD advisors, and all the field at the time thought, and I just didn’t believe it. And I didn’t believe it, because if the idea is that attitudes and beliefs are formed because they’re learned that they are not born with them. We’re not hardwired, that they’re learned from the environment around us, through observation, through just associations, then we should be able to unlearn them. So I remember sitting in the lab and thinking, well, then we should be able to expose people to media images of different kinds of people that don’t fit the stereotype. So we call them counter stereotypes, so people who are opposite of stereotypes, and if we show them enough media images so people who people and descriptions of people who are counter to the stereotype, if that should be able to change the implicit stereotypes. So I did little mini experiments on myself, and when they started working on my on myself, I started running experiments, you know, using our participant pool. And when those worked, I persuaded my PhD, but my postdoc advisor to allow me because he wasn’t sure that they would work, to run it, and when those worked, he, he and I had a bet that that that they wouldn’t work, and when they they they did work. He reluctantly, you know, dished out the $5 that he had lost. And that was my first big publication, Dasgupta and Greenwald 2001 that really launched my career, the idea that implicit attitudes are malleable, are changeable, and that what we see passively in our environment, even if they run counter to what we had learned before can shift around our implicit attitudes momentarily. Doesn’t mean that they will stick if they can bounce back to what what our environment shows us. So the idea is that the mind is a mirror that that our environment really is is sort of our mind. The environment is the is the is a mirror on our mind reflects what we see. And if we see something different, it will reflect on our mind and it’ll stick. So that was the in in 2001 when that paper was published, really shifted and changed the direction of my career.

Kris Safarova  08:43

And congratulations on publishing that paper. I know those breakthroughs in career mean so much. Yes, so going back a little bit, just to clarify, do you remember a defining moment that sparked your interest in studying bias and discrimination specifically?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  09:01

Yes, I do actually, I think it was the experience of of immigration. So, you know, I came to the US as an 18 year old international student and as a as a student coming from from India. I came from a background where I was the majority group, and I was an upper middle class student in high school, student in India. So I was not only from the religious majority group, but I was also from an upper middle class family background. So so I didn’t feel I was advantaged, but I didn’t know it. But when I came to the US, I was suddenly different. I was in a natural experiment. So I was suddenly different on multiple dimensions. I was a scholarship student. So I was suddenly not upper middle class. I was now suddenly poor. So I was mostly on scholarships. So I was washing dishes. I was sort of in dining services. I was I was a student who was who was going to school and working a lot of hours. I was also a student in a in a private liberal arts college who was sort of an international student, who spoke differently, who dressed differently, who was a student of color in a mostly white college in a mostly white town. So I felt different, I looked different, I sounded different. It felt really It felt really odd, and I think I wasn’t prepared for it. And that experience of being in terms of social class, going from being up to going down, and in terms of race, not being aware of being racialized, to suddenly becoming in the US system, sort of a racial minority, which was not something I ever had even thought of, and then from being a religious majority group to a religious minority group, all of those differences, I suddenly experienced the feeling of going from being majority to minority. It is that natural experiment, if you will, made me aware of what it feels like to go from to belong to a group where you feel minoritized, and where other people question whether you’re good enough. So I had these odd experiences, which now seem trivial, but at that time really stung, where somebody would say, Oh, you speak such good English. And I remember thinking, Well, of course I do. I grew up bilingual, but at that time, it didn’t feel quite so, so normal. So those experiences got me interested in the study of bias.

Kris Safarova  12:14

Many of our listeners will be in a similar position. They immigrated here. They didn’t come here with parents. They weren’t born in United States or Canada or the UK and so on, and they are facing this situation that you now described, and based on how you described, it seems your experience was somewhat pleasant and didn’t had open discrimination. I personally had open discrimination experiences, and I know some of our listeners also had it. What would be your advice when you are hardworking, driven leader, but you speak with the accent and you are different, you look different, you came from a different culture, how can you allow this not to get to you and not to derail your career progression?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  12:57

That is a great question. I don’t know that there is a perfect one answer. It sort of depends on the nuances of the situation. So I just want to be I want to be honest about that. So there’s many kinds of discrimination. There is overt hatred, there’s violence, and the answers to that are quite different from the more subtle ostracism and the even more subtle questioning of one’s ability. So I think, I think the answer, my answer, would be very different, depending on the degree of discrimination and the type of discrimination. I would say, if it were non violent, but questioning one’s ability, I would say one answer, not the only one would be, find your people. Find some people who will be your advocates. It might be one or two people who will vouch for you, who will be your who will who will look out for you, who will have your back and and having a couple of those people mean a lot, because it’s not the number, it’s the quality. That’s that would be one thing that I think matters a lot. It could be an informal mentor. It could be a peer who will stand up for you. It doesn’t have to be a senior person. It could be a peer. So that’s one thing for me. I think actually my roommate at the time, my first year, was often the person who when something would. Where somebody would say, Oh, you speak such good English, and I would just be enraged. My it is my roommate who would stand up for me, which, which meant a lot. The second thing I would say is convert rage into into something that is more productive, like becoming better approving oneself. I think I did. Did that a lot. The third thing I think that helped me a lot is to, is to, is to convert it into allyship and collective action. So I figured I had a lot to learn from American students who knew about the experience of being disadvantaged in a way that I did not. So I got active. There was a lot. There were student groups who were about racial and cultural awareness work, who led racial and cultural awareness workshops on campus. So I joined those groups. I partly, initially just to, just to understand my own experiences and to give some words to it that was very helpful, partly to then become a workshop leader myself. Initially, I was trying to understand myself, and was to educate myself, and then it was to find a sense of community, and then it was to educate other people. So those would be the types of things I would say, find your people, find somebody who would back you up. Find a way to understand your own experiences, find a way to engage in collective action and channel your anger into something productive.

Kris Safarova  16:51

Very good advice. And just to build on that, what do you think are some immediate ways to handle microaggressions? So for example, offhand comments about your accent within a professional situation, so in the corporate world, for example.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  17:06

Yeah. My favorite is to say that everybody speaks with an accent. We all speak with an accent, whether it is a Boston accent or sort of a standard American accent, or a southern accent, or a Midwestern accent, or an Indian accent or a British accent, we all speak with an accent. So there is no saying that somebody speaks with an accent essentially assumes that there is a standard against which the rest of us are measured, right? But there is no standard. There is no standard. We all speak with a particular accent. That’s what I would say. I would actually flip the script by saying, if you think I speak with an accent that assumes that you think you are the standard. But I would, I would argue that we all speak with an accent. You do too.

Kris Safarova  18:11

Thank you for this. So in writing your recent book, change the wallpaper. What is core message that you would like leaders to take away from reading that book.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  18:22

Yeah, so change the wallpaper is it offers a science driven approach to how to make culture change in service of equality and and justice. So by reading this book, people will learn how to recognize that the power of situations in which we live help to maintain the status quo, and they will also learn that individuals acting together as a group is essential to change that status quo one piece at a time. It is not individuals acting alone, but it is individuals acting together. So the book shows that powerful situational forces that are around us nudge our thoughts and our actions in very small incremental ways that accumulate over time in one of two directions. They either pull us apart based on small initial differences and make us more and more unfamiliar from each other, increasing distrust, increasing polarization, or they push us together in small ways, increasing trust and increasing inclusion. It is these situational forces that I call wallpaper. They affect all of us, and their effects are can be positive. It, or they can be negative. And once we realize how these forces act, we can strategically avoid the negative effects and we can harness the positive ones. And that is the call to action, and that is the place for hope, definitely.

Kris Safarova  20:20

And what I think is also important to highlight here is that what you are studying can also be applied in other areas. So for example, someone can be impacted by the wallpaper around them in terms of their views on money. So for example, they may have negative beliefs related to money that is impacting them in a bad way, or, for example, how productive they can be. So it’s a very powerful concept to understand and try to apply in your life. So let’s talk about leaders applying it in their life. Once those unspoken norms and traditions are established, what does it take to disrupt these patterns and habits?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  20:59

Yeah, so it sort of depends on the kind of wallpaper we’re talking about. So in the in the book, I talk about four kinds of wallpaper. I talk about norms and habits. That is one thing you’re talking about. So, so the wallpaper is, it could be the the rules or the norms that we take for granted that some people know about how to navigate life, that are the unspoken, unspoken norms of how to climb up the professional ladder that other people just don’t know. And if you know how to how to navigate the world or navigate the professional ladder, then there’s no friction, and it’s easy to take advantage of opportunity, whereas other people don’t know it, and there’s a lot of friction, and you miss opportunity. So So knowing the rules of the game is one kind of wallpaper. So I’m wondering if you’re talking about that kind of wallpaper, but others, another kind of wallpaper is what, what involves symbolic wallpaper or stories, the stories that that allow us to interpret what seems normal and natural and why things are the way they are and and whether something is normal and deserved and fair or whether it is unfair. So that’s the second kind of wallpaper. And the third is the material culture, how things appear to us in our physical environment. And the fourth is the people in high places, the people who we look up to, who we respect and who who we admire, the portraits on the wall. So there are four kinds of wallpaper that I talk about in the book, material culture, symbolic culture, norms and customs and stories.

Kris Safarova  22:59

So let’s dive in on each of them, if you don’t mind, because I think helpful. So how do you disrupt rewrite, in a way, each of those wallpapers for someone?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  23:13

Yeah, so I wonder if you want to, if you I wonder if it would be helpful for your listeners to take a particular example that’s relevant to their to their situation. So especially if it is a if it is a business audience, you want to take like a case or an example of something that is a workplace example. So give me, give me an example that you think your audience will relate to, and then I’ll pick up on it, and then I’ll apply it to want something that that is a type of wallpaper I talk about in the book.

Kris Safarova  23:53

Of course. So imagine we have someone who just was promoted to partner within a major management consulting firm, someone who is from your homeland, and they are very, very talented, successful, diligent person, they were able to get promoted all the way to partner, but they do feel certain level of discrimination, even though it is a very good organization, and there’s a lot of attention paid to make sure that people feel included and no one feels discriminated, but they still feel certain level of discrimination, both from people they managing, and also from people above them. So for example, they may feel discriminated because they’re speaking with an accent.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  24:36

Yeah. Okay. Now I now, now I understand. Now I understand better. Yeah, so in that, in that case, it makes me, makes me wonder whether the issue is that the stories of success that who is seen as the ideal partner is. Is somebody who is different from the way this person sounds and looks, that the ideal partner is somebody who is all American, a fifth, sixth generation American, who is totally different and nobody looks like this. This person that who’s a picture you’re painting for me. And so this person, this, this new immigrant, is completely different. They are the first of the kind who is a who is, who is a partner. And if that’s the case, then essentially they are. They are not the ideal quote, ideal partner, and they need to write a new story that partners can look and be of many kinds. And I, in some ways, I think this, this kind of company, needs to write a new story of a new kind. This person is a pioneer. They are a first vanguard of their kind. It’s it’s almost an opportunity for them to write their own story. So I would say that this person might want to, if they have a fellow senior mentor or somebody else in the company who has their back to say that I feel that, even though I’m a partner, something is not right. I don’t feel like I have I get the same respect. I feel like I need to write my own story, that there are many ways to be a partner, and that maybe I’m the first partner of a different kind. So there’s a new story that needs to be told, and that is a great example of changing the symbolic culture of this company. So that’s what would be the place I would go about changing the wallpaper in this example.

Kris Safarova  27:14

And when you say rewriting a story or writing your own story, are you thinking about, for example, this partner being featured in some internal publication.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  27:23

Yeah, that’s I was actually thinking exactly like that, that the comms team, the comms team of this company, could write a feature, a story in both in the internal magazine or website. But if this is a big enough company, they would probably have an externally facing media channel, or social media or other channels telling the story of their leaders. I would make I would say that that story should go both on internal and external channels, that that this company has a next generation, new leadership that is, looks and feels global and is is more is sort of is next generation.

Kris Safarova  28:19

So that covers symbolic wallpaper. Can we take a look at the other three?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  28:23

Yeah, so I’ll go to the to the physical design place, because I think that this, this is something that I think happens a lot in in companies that, at least the ones that are still have a visit, a physical presence. So oftentimes in companies, and I talk about in this book that that there are two types of physical presence in companies, again, ones that are not 100% remote. Some companies have physical offices where the C suite is segregated from the rest of the employees, so the C suite so I talk about in my in my book, The opening story is about Bon Appetit Magazine, where the C suite is in the Manhattan building, is on the upper floor, and that’s where the editorial team is doing their work and deciding Who gets in the magazine and who’s on the masthead, that’s the must head team, and the people who are doing in the Test Kitchen, they are downstairs on a lower floor. So it’s very much of an upstairs, downstairs situation. And people don’t meet. So it’s very segregated, and the upper, high prestige job, people in those jobs never meet people in the in the lower prestige jobs. So it’s very segregated. There’s no real relationships among those two. The other kind of example is, is the another example I give in the book, which is totally different, which is a startup that I talk about called. Shift where it’s where the CEO of the company doesn’t have a separate office. He sits with the rest of his team in an open floor plan, and he is interacting with his with his with his employees, and talking to them about the projects that they’re working on. And his employees feel that they have real relationships with the guy, and they know him, and he knows them, and they have very high retention and very good relationships. So these two are two extremes, and there’s probably lots in the middle. So these are good, sort of emblematic examples of how the physical design of the work place can influence whether people mix with each other socially or in just casual conversations with each other, across lines of role, job prestige, and because those rules are also segregated by social identities, by social class, it affects whether people actually know each other, and it affects inclusion. So that’s an example of the material culture. That’s the second kind of wallpaper in the book.

Kris Safarova  31:17

What about the first type of wallpaper?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  31:20

Norms and customs? Yeah, so norms and customs could actually also relate to your first case study that you gave, but it’s based It’s basically when somebody comes into a company who either knows the informal ways to navigate the system. They know how to have informal conversations with somebody higher up, knows how to get stretch assignments, knows how to get tapped for an important team or FaceTime with a client versus another person who does just doesn’t know what kind of assignments matter more or not. So the social norms of a workplace, as you know very much in the corporate world, probably much better than I do, are often not spoken and some people who come from more privileged backgrounds. Know those norms and rules much better than others. And if you know those norms and rules, in my book, I show that the visual image that I that I how I represented, is through a maze. Some people know how to navigate that maze very easily. They know the roadmap to get through the maze, to get the pot of gold at the end of the maze. Other people get lost in the maze. They get stuck. They can’t find their way out, and they miss opportunities. So norms are like knowing the way through the maze. So if you know the norm, then you there’s no friction. You can get through the maze very easily. If you don’t know the norm, you keep banging up against the wall, you get stuck, and you can’t find your way out. So that’s, that’s the fourth kind of wallpaper.

Kris Safarova  33:15

And then the last type of wallpaper you mentioned was people in high places.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  33:19

Yeah, people in high places is I think of it as portraits on the wall. So when we enter an organization, you the example I gave in the book is when I came to college, I could I stepped into my campus and all around me in the main administrative building, I saw portraits on the wall of the major donors who had given endowments to this, this very wealthy liberal arts college. From that those those portraits I knew exactly who mattered in this college. So in a boardroom, you see the portraits on the wall by looking at the people in the portraits. You know. You know who matters in this company. You know what they’re what they look like. You know who their roles are, roles were or are. And you know who is missing. So people in representation is the fourth kind of wallpaper that tells you the kinds of people who are valued, who are respected, and the roles that are valued and respected if they all look the same, if they if the roles are all the same, that tells you there’s a very narrow band of people and roles that matter in This organization. If the band of people and roles that are that are valued and respected and that are elevated and rewarded, and the portraits on the wall are very diverse, then you know, there’s a lot of different ways to get recognized in this company. So who is on the wall, metaphorically speaking, tells you you. If there’s a lot of ways to get valued and respected in this organization, or if there’s a very narrow way to get valued and respected, and who is missing also tells you what, who is less valued, and people can pick that up very, very quickly. So the wallpaper, the reason I like this metaphor of the wallpaper is because we pick it up very quickly. We are not often totally conscious of it. It’s in the background. It’s really sort of in the peripheries of our attention. We know it. We can see it when we walk into the room. We may not always articulate it to ourselves, but we are sort of halfway aware of it. And if we we know what is valued, we know what is not valued, and we register it at some level. And we initially may think it’s not that important, but it accumulates in our mind, and over time, it can elevate some people and it can drag other people down.

Kris Safarova  36:08

You mentioned in your work that certain workplace behaviors, so for example, being extroverted are often mistakenly equated with talent. We all experienced it. We all saw it. First of all, other than being extroverted, what are other workplace behaviors that are often mistakenly equated with talent? And how can organizations but evaluate and reward diverse contributions?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  36:32

Yeah, I think accent is, is an excellent example. We started with accent in this conversation. There’s a lot of research that shows that certain types of that both that both extraversion, speaking with confidence and accent, are three kinds of verbal markers, behavioral markers that are mistaken for talent, even when they are actually not correlated with talent. People mistake speaking with, you know, speaking with emphasis, like I’m speaking now as as if they are indicators of knowledge or talent, and speaking with lack of confidence as if they are uncertainty as if they’re not indicators of talent, and they’re not correlated with talent. So extroversion, confidence and and accent are are highly correlated with mistakenly assuming that the person is is more talented than than the than the opposite the other things that are that are mistakenly correlated with talent are names. So in my book, I talk about names in both here and also in Europe, depending on the country the particular the names are different, but in the US, names that sound more white are assumed to be more more talented. There, there are, you know, very nice, sort of rigorously done experiments that show that resume studies where the names that have white sounding names are called back for jobs more than than than resumes that are identical, that has names that have black sounding African American sounding names in Sweden, names that have native Swedish names are called back for interviews at a higher rate than names that have Muslim sounding names. In India, names that have Hindu sorry, names that have upper caste Hindu sounding names are called back at higher rates than names that have lower caste Hindu sounding names. So depending on on the country, the status marker of names is different, caste in one case, religion in another case, race in another case. So all of these are markers that are mistaken for talent when they actually are not.

Kris Safarova  39:11

I think you surprised some of our listeners when you mentioned that accent is one of those things that signals to people. Oh, this person is more talented. Can you elaborate?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  39:20

Yeah. So in the research that I talk about in the book in chapter one, I think says that there’s this gradation of perceptions of talent, so in the US standard, in what’s considered standard English. So the English that is that you see spoken on the in in the news is called Standard English, or the English that you hear, if you were to hear a recording in Google Translate or so on, that’s considered standard English. That English is considered a. More intelligent, whereas English, that is regional, is considered less less intelligent. Upper Class English is considered standard English. So by the way, people can detect social class very, very quickly, within 30 seconds, actually, less than 30 seconds, people can guess pretty accurately someone’s social class based on just a few seconds of hearing them speak, and based on that, make inferences, false inferences, I might add, about how smart they are. Then, outside of the American English spoken British English is considered to be, again, not accurately, more intelligent than other types of European English. And then Asian and African accents are considered to be at the bottom of the of the accent hierarchy. So people have very fine tuned assumptions about what accent is considered to be, people speaking with what accent are considered to be, to be intelligent. It’s quite disturbing and it’s quite demoralizing. But I think knowledge is power, so it’s better that we know it, and if we know it, then we should sort of adjust for it, which is partly why I write in the book that we should understand. What are we judging people on? If it is a work product, then that’s part of the thing that I that I say in the book, that we should say that if what we are judging people on is the is the actual work product, the technical work, let’s say, or the financial work, or the programming work, or the presentation work, then say what it is, say what the rubric is for judging it, for evaluating the quality of the work. And then say what it is not it is not confidence, it is not accent, it is not extroversion. And then give people a fixed amount of time to produce that work, and then to the extent that it is possible, and I recognize it’s not always possible, de identify the identity of the person producing the work, and just judge the quality of the work.

Kris Safarova  42:33

This is very interesting. When you spoke about accent, I immediately guessed British accent definitely will be one of those things you will mention. But thank you so much for breaking it down. So if someone thinking about So, let’s say we have someone listening to us right now who, let’s say they are that same leader. Continue that same story. They just promoted the partner within a major management consulting firm, and they speak with an Indian accent. Should they work on trying to acquire British accent or American accent if they want to change their accent?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  43:02

I would say they should just keep their accent. I would say they should just keep their accent. I think they should just do good work and keep their accent. I know this is not this may or may not be the answer you want to hear. I think we need to get comfortable hearing people speak in lots of different ways. So you know when I, when I came to the US almost 40 years ago now, I um, I remember having to decide whether to hold on to the way I speak, and and I worked to hold on to the way I speak. And over time has become more Americanized, the hours have become more rolling, but I still have held on to more of the Indian accent. It’s changed a little bit 40 years. Or 38 years is a long time, but I think it’s important to hold on to to to who you are, and then you will change with it. But be understood, be understood, be understood. So I think clarity and being understood by the people we are communicating with is important. So but to completely 100% change who we are doesn’t feel authentic, and being authentic is important. So why change whole whole sale that doesn’t seem that doesn’t seem right.

Kris Safarova  44:48

Do you have any advice on how to reduce stress related to discrimination?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  44:53

Yeah, so there’s a lot of research on on uh. Um community on community and belonging, and its impact on social belonging and its impact on stress reduction, so people who feel a sense of togetherness and less loneliness. So, you know, there’s been tremendous attention to loneliness being a social epidemic and a public health risk. So the opposite of loneliness is, is social belonging. So finding a sense a group and the group can be, can be a group of doesn’t have to be a group of people like you or whoever the person who is the target of discrimination, but finding, in the beginning, I said, find find your people, finding your people, the people who you feel a sense of community with, who who you can trust, and that group can will grow and could be a group of people who are quite couldn’t do that doesn’t all have to be people like the individual themselves. That is, is actually a big protective factor to to to preventing loneliness and protecting health. So I would say that is one. That’s not the only one, but that is, that is, that is one of them.

Kris Safarova  46:34

What do you think are common pitfalls that leaders organizations fall into one address and inequality? So for example, in your book, you mentioned that direct instruction is not as effective as people think.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  46:47

Yeah. So I think, I think the common way to think about diversity and inclusion for the past, I don’t know how many decades has been to treat it as a map, as as something that we can train, that we can address with training. So we have been using various kinds of diversity training. We call it dei training. We call it unconsciousness bias training. We call it cultural awareness training. The names are different. It’s a cottage industry, and as I say in the book, The estimates are we spend about $8 billion on it every year. That stuff when you know I when I looked at it, the most of it is not evidence based, but some of it is. And when you look at the meta analysis, the meta analysis are basically reviews of of empirical reviews of all of the studies looking at the impacts of them, collect of the studies. Collectively, what you find is that, is that these kinds of diversity trainings do increase people’s awareness of the of the issues of the problem. They may increase people’s knowledge of of of the of the issues. They may even sometimes change their attitudes or beliefs. But if the goal is to change people’s behavior, there’s very little evidence that diversity training changes people’s behavior. There is also absolutely no evidence that diversity chain training changes hiring, changes leadership, changes organizational culture changes retention. There is no evidence that diversity training has any such effect. So what I would say to organizational leaders is that the idea of using diversity training as the way to use belief change to change individuals behavior, and use assume that that behavior change, if it were to occur, would change organizational culture that connecting of the dots. There is no evidence that that is there, so I think we should give it up and change, try something different. I think we should actually use the evidence, use data, to drive our strategies. And if this doesn’t work, let’s try something different. And that is what I am suggesting we do in the book. So in the book, I’m suggesting other strategies that do work. So depending on the leaders, if they are data driven, there are other kinds of approaches that are about changing something in the culture, something in the situation, to change people’s behavior, which then changes organizational culture.

Kris Safarova  50:01

I also want to wrap up our discussion today with two questions that I really love asking when there’s an opportunity where there’s still time left. One is, what are specific practices, habits that you personally really rely on to remain an effective professional in your field?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  50:19

Yeah, I’ll mention two. One is listening more Actually, I’ll see I say it differently, curiosity, curiosity that leads to listening. So in in my work, I find that if I spend more time hanging out with my students and my staff and just listen to them without speaking, I learn a lot about what’s going on that I didn’t know before without any agenda. Outside of an agenda driven meeting, I tend to be more agenda driven, and this way of being is very different for me, and I found it very useful so curiosity, agenda free, and especially listening to people who are in a very different role from me and people who are much more junior to me and in roles that are have less power. So I would say that is the primary and the second thing, which is totally different, is meditation. I find that meditation keeps me sane.

Kris Safarova  52:01

Which technique for meditation do you use? If you don’t mind sharing?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  52:07

I do two. One is just the the usual, the mindfulness body scan, but I sometimes switch it around. And instead of doing the body scan, if I find myself getting distracted, I’ll switch to focusing on sound. So the the goal is to focus, to focus on something. So I sometimes focus on the physical body. Sometimes I’ll switch to focusing on the sound. Other times I do walking meditation, if the when the weather is good, which now I’m in New England and it’s in the winter, but in when the weather gets good, in the spring or the summer, I love walking meditation in the woods.

Kris Safarova  52:57

And then the last question, my favorite question to ask of the last few years, what were two, three aha moments, realizations that you feel comfortable sharing with us that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business?

Nilanjana Dasgupta  53:12

I found that there are things that are fusions so that food, music, travel and this book, all of them are fusions, fusions of sound, flavors, cultures, ideas, I find myself gravitating towards mixtures. And maybe the aha moment, maybe the AHA is that I think that that happens because I’m an immigrant. I think I like like things that are mixtures, because that’s my life, that that’s the life I’ve led. I think that’s, that’s the that’s the message, that’s the aha moment, or the AHA message, and the business part of it, this is, this is interesting. This is, this is actually, this is an Aha. So I you started by asking about how I got into this whole idea. And I’ve realized that my career has come from my mother’s side of the family, which has been the intellectual side, the side that that is the science side, and the side that is the social justice side. My father’s side of the family is the business side, the entrepreneur side. But now those two sides are coming together, because what I’m trying to do is to take the ideas, the science. The social justice and converted into practice, converted into application, which is essentially a way to make it into a startup or an entrepreneurial practice, or something like that. I don’t quite know what that is, and that is a bit of an aha, too. So those are my two.

Kris Safarova  55:26

Yolan, Janet, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being so open, so generous with everything you shared. And I really appreciate you doing the work that you are doing, because it’s a very important work. I really appreciate all the kindness you have in your heart towards other human beings, and you desire to help them be included, and for everyone to feel that they have a place and they can make the contribution.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  55:51

Thank you for your very wise questions. You’re a wise woman. You’ve asked some really good questions, and I think I feel, your questions. Thank you very much.

Kris Safarova  56:03

And thank you so much for your kind words. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book, anything you want to share.

Nilanjana Dasgupta  56:10

Change the wallpaper.com. Is the website for my book. It has a place to order the book, and it also has an author page where they can learn more about about my work, and it has other information about me. And the place to buy the book gets published on January 7. There’s multiple places that they can people can buy the book. The listeners can you can buy it from your indie bookstore. There are the big box stores. So there are multiple links that that you’ll find there on my website, change the wallpaper.com. Thank you Kris.

Kris Safarova  56:51

Thank you Nilanjana. So much. Our guest today, again has been Nilanjana Dasgupta. Check out her book. It’s called Change the Wallpaper. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used and well-managed strategy studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you as a gift, and you can get it at F-I-R-M-S consulting.com forward slash overall approach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of us firms. If you’re currently updating your resume, it’s a great resume to take a look at and see what you can tweak on your resume. And you can get it at F-I-R-M-S consulting.com forward slash resumepdf. Thank you so much for being with us today, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.