Q&A with - René Carayol MBE & Shereen Daniels
Shereen Daniels
There is a pushback coming now, from majority white colleagues who feel like talking about racism has had his time. They’re tired now. They feel like, you know, we spent all this time focusing on Black people when re we going to talk about everybody else.
And we’ve now started to see some people shift their focus. It’s moved, so that they’re not trying to make an impact for people most affected, i.e. Black colleagues, but they’re putting all their energy into making their white majority colleagues, leaders, managers feel more comfortable. Now, my personal point of view when I’m asked this question is this was always going to happen. This is a function of racism. Racism flourishes because of our discomfort, racism flourishes because we don’t challenge enough and when we do challenge the discomfort pushes us back. So we stopped talking about racism and we start talking about the nicer things. Racism never sees the light of day, which means we never tackle the root causes.
René Carayol MBE
We see this every day and I get the dynamic. I saw it before the days of cultural change initiatives.
Those who are in power will always want the status quo to remain, and eventually they’re going to kick back. And that’s just life. So what I see are the remedies. If your inclusion catalyst is coming from too low down an organisation it’s easily ignored and easily crushed. It’s got to be in the C-Suite. Every single cultural change initiative will get crushed in middle management. Inclusion isn’t a middle management challenge.
This is a chief executive challenge.
When we get called him the archetype the problem we experience are all variations of: the chief executive and their direct reports saying the right thing, doing the right thing and setting the right tone and then you’ve got you’ve got five, six, seven levels of middle management for a plethora of different reasons are disengaged with all the excuses in the world. Then you’ve got the entry level employees, the younger generation, screaming,“You’re saying the right things. Nothing’s happening. We don’t believe you.” And that when I get called. And it’s to address the middle management.
How do we energise these people to take this seriously and be part of the solution? We can call it
any adjective we like, but that is the problem. The challenge. And what we try and do is create transparency so that they can be held to account with the chief executive.
It’s got much more scrutiny and much more volatile because we put the lens of racism through it, but I’ve seen it 1000 times. I think the big challenge is that change is trying to take place too junior in an organisation.
Shereen Daniels
An associated question to that is literally an add on to what you’ve just said there. There’s many people who you know whether you’re an HR professional, whether you’re a business leader, etc. We know about cultural transformation. We know almost the textbook pieces in it about bringing people in, taking them on the journey, listening and all of those things. What is in your view about racism, discrimination and understanding how power dynamics are vastly different to the detriment of certain colleagues. In that we have made so little progress, that we don’t even have a Black CEO or chairperson on the FTSE 100.
René Carayol MBE
I saw this three days after George Flloyd’s murder when my Whatsapp started to go crazy. It was white, middle aged, middle class men who are chair or chief executives, who I respect and I know well, asking me what they should do, “We’re paralysed with fear. Of say the wrong thing. This is a conversation that’s not going to get me anywhere good. What do I have to do?” Honestly, I was doing 15 minute coaching sessions saying the same things. Be authentic. You will make some mistakes. Apologise. Your allies will get around you if you’re trying to do the right thing. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
It’s a bit like swimming, you’d have to get into the pool at some point. And you’re going to get a mouthful of water and a belly full of water. But there’s people around to ensure you can swim.
Secondly, if we look where influences are, where power is, and how we persuade, then we look where black people are in the organisation. The two don’t correlate. There’s not a strong bond. This is about allies. And it’s available and it’s there, but we need our leaders to step up into.
We’ve got to write like leaders and engage your organisation on an inspiring journey of change. And that’s about equity. About the level playing field. And every time it happens business performance goes up so the big question is why wouldn’t you do it?
There is no hiding place. But I’m not sure we’re having those conversations appropriately forcefully at the moment. It’s coming. And it’s going to be a tidal wave. This will not go away.