Interview: Mary Ellen Capek
Mary Ellen Capek is Principal of Capek & Associates and the lead author of Effective Philanthropy: Organizational Success Through Deep Diversity and Gender Equality (MIT Press, 2006) which won the 2007 Virginia A. Hodgkinson Research Prize for the best book on philanthropy in the nonprofit sector that informs policy and practice.
This interview was conducted and edited by DPP Consultants Jessica Bearman and Anna Pond.
Tell us about where the idea and passion for the book originated.
The Kellogg Foundation came to me and Molly Mead, my co-author, in the late 90s, asking us to write a book about why funding for women and girls was still so hard to raise. As we got into the book, it became increasingly clear that the issues we were seeing applied to a wider understanding of effectiveness in philanthropy across the board, including more nuanced understanding of organizational culture. We also realized we were needed to apply lessons from our own backgrounds. In my work within philanthropy, for example, as well as in higher education, I had personally learned a lot about functioning (for better or for worse) within elite institutions. So we refocused to consider, among other questions, what is it about elite institutions that makes it so difficult for so many people to thrive ? Our passion came from our desire to frame issues in ways that go deep and name sources of some of the tensions and problems that we run into in organizations.
Let’s talk a little bit about deep diversity, which is a central concept in the book. How would you characterize it as different from what is commonly meant by diversity?
Well, if a person says “diversity,” in most contexts people think race or ethnicity, and a lot of what we were trying to do was reframe the term. We got a lot of feedback from our research that pointed to the need for new language. Our language for talking about these concerns has not been keeping up with the realities of our needs.
In the book, we define diversity as both deep and wide. Wide in the sense of as many kinds of differences you can imagine bringing together in any organization, and deep in the sense that it’s institutionalized and becomes part of the organization’s culture, drilled down into the taproot of any given organization. We’ve got to expand our definitions of diversity as well as get beyond the numbers. Obviously numbers count, hugely count. But if we stop there, we’re never going to get to a place where deep diversity becomes institutionalized.
As you explored deep diversity, did you and Molly struggle with unacknowledged biases and prejudices of your own?
Yeah, oh boy, did we ever! You know, even when you’ve been doing this work for so long, you never succeed at prying out all the stereotypes, even about gender. They are built into our enculturation. We are never free of stereotypes, especially about race, and I think it’s foolish to think we ever can be. The trick is to recognize them for what they are when they surface.
One big thing I learned is that you never get back to the garden of Eden. No matter how much you try and want to, it can be difficult to deal with people who are different from you. Whether it’s race, whether they think differently, whether it’s different strategies for approaching how they organize their desk, it’s like marriage counseling. You’re always dealing with stuff that never quite gets named but is very much there in any relationship. And naming the “undiscussables” is one key to all of this work.
The book is about improving the effectiveness of philanthropic institutions specifically. Talk about the connection between effectiveness and diversity. Why does philanthropy need to worry about diversity?
In the work I do these days, I find I can focus much more on talking about healthy organizations, not even necessarily mentioning the word diversity. Because building diversity is all about maximizing the health of organizations.
A Michigan economist, Scott Page, has just come out with a book called The Difference, where he documents, using mathematical models, that diversity in most settings trumps ability. He’s talking about diversity much more in the framework of different ways of thinking, but he also applies it to a whole range of differences. I think that’s why foundations need to focus on diversity: if they want to build healthy, effective organizations, diversity in all its forms is a key part of the picture.
We make the point in the book that “shallow diversity organizations are seldom effective.” We’ve taken some hits for that, but I still stand by the assertion. If you don’t have the people within your foundation who are much more representative of the communities you’re trying to reach, you’re never going to be able to do your work effectively. Corporations are learning this more quickly than foundations.
Norm with a capital N is a pervasive character in the book and a pervasive character in every organization. The idea that there are these ways of being “normal” that are dictatorial in organizations. Could you talk more explicitly about Norm and its impact?
In the book, we use gender as a thread to pull that unravels norm. Naming norms means putting language on things that nobody likes to talk about—the “undiscussables,” the elephants on the table. I would argue that within any given group of people – a family or an organization or a community – when people look at and NAME, attach language to, their problems, concerns, issues, opinions, and assumptions, they are going to be a lot healthier, because they’re not spending time rationalizing and expecting people to understand things that nobody wants to talk about.
Norms are the building blocks of civil society. There’s a metaphor we use in the book: HDL and LDL cholsterol. HDL, the good cholesterol, protects us against heart attacks, but too much LDL, the low density lipoprotein circulating in our blood, forms plaque and thick hard deposits that clog the arteries.
Bad norms get in the way of our health and the health of our relationships in organizations. A lot of norms get passed down in the culture of the organization without ever being looked at. Who gets to decide what’s proper and acceptable behavior? Does it really matter if you wear a necktie or not? Why do these kinds of norms and guides so often become blind spots that get in the way of effective organizations? I know that this language may not appeal to everybody, but talking about the stuff that nobody wants to talk about in an organization is key to any kind of deep diversity.
That makes sense. Some organizations might look diverse but since the same norms remain in play, they still function as though untouched by difference.
Right. That’s where I think that understanding foundations as elite institutions is really important. Elite institutions especially expect new people coming into the organization to fit in to the dominant culture. The challenge becomes how you keep the good parts of organizational culture—the history, the traditions that everybody really loves and values—and at the same time, look at what the dead weight really is. One of my favorite books from the last couple of years is Kenji Yoshino’s Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights (Random House, 2006). When organizations don’t change to accommodate differences, then people are expected to cover to fit in. They’re expected to learn all the explicit and implicit secret handshakes. And that quickly becomes deadening. It becomes much harder to cut through and allow differences and accommodate new energy, new ideas, and creativity.
So, are you saying that the culture might not serve anyone at all and that the norms serve the tradition, not the living breathing people of the modern day?
There are so many wonderful traditions that people feel strongly about. But when you peel off all those layers, there seems to be a point at which many of the traditions don’t really serve the best interests of most of the stakeholders in the organization. This disconnect is one of the experiences that got me interested in social science (I have a Ph.D. in contemporary American poetry).
When I first got to Princeton in the mid-seventies, just as they were starting to admit women and minority students in larger numbers, I kept thinking, somebody has got to have written about this disconnect between organizational culture and “new” people (and many old ones as well) who didn’t feel they “fit.” It is as if traditions and culture within an organization become a whole other stakeholder. And it’s hard to change that. A friend of mine refers to this phenomenon as the “silly putty” phenomenon. She has had long tenures as president of both a college and a university, and while she was at each institution, she was seen as a creative, effective leader, strengthening both organizations in significant ways. And she felt she was able to make some significant changes in both those cultures, especially around issues of deep diversity and inclusion. But the minute she left – boing! She saw the organizations reverting right back to some of their old habits, losing many of the gains she had institutionalized.
Talk a little more about the idea that deep and embedded diversity and inclusive practice makes things harder. If foundations really do this work, will it make their work harder at least in the short term?
I should clarify. Short term the work can feel harder, as elephants are put on the table and taboo topics surfaced. But over the long term, this work actually makes things easier because it helps provide a more accurate diagnosis of where things go awry in organizations.
The key here is that the leadership in an organization is willing to take a look at power in the elite culture and what that means. People don’t like to give up power easily. So, if giving up power is hard, then the work will be hard. But, once you’re past that, you’ve got an opportunity to release hidden energy and creativity throughout the organization. You’re not saying “oh, you’re a racist” or “oh, you just don’t get it”. If it’s framed positively, it becomes an opportunity for significant new energy, not to mention sanity. I have been called Pollyanna before and I’m sure I will again, but that’s been my experience.
So, what, what kinds of pragmatic steps or solutions does the book offer, or would you offer to make philanthropy more effective.
I think we need more case studies. We’ve got six case studies in the book, stories of very different kinds of foundations. We need to get more concrete about what people have done and how people have worked through these issues. There are some practical strategies. One of my favorites was when the California Wellness Foundation increased the size of its staff and moved to a more diverse staff, diverse measured in a variety of ways. They were having all kinds of trouble just understanding each other. So they established a rule that, in any given staff meeting, whoever spoke could expect that whoever responded would restate what he or she had heard in different words.
It was simply an active-listening exercise, reframing what had been said, but that very simple exercise cut through a lot of misunderstanding. It made the speakers feel heard, and it made the listeners listen more acutely: they were able to test their understanding of what they had actually heard. And if they hadn’t understood, then they could ask questions and try to get clarification. It cleared up a lot of misunderstandings and some difficult stuff that was going on. And that’s just one example.
What else do you wish each foundation or any elite organization would do tomorrow to start to take a step down this road?
It varies so from organization to organization. For me the most important thing is to create a climate in an organization that communicates to all the stakeholders that they are listened to, heard, and valued. What are the concrete steps? Well, you create situations in staff meetings where you have active listening. You institutionalize the respect. You ask people questions. You create work groups where people can share their own thinking and ideas without fear of reprisal. So building diversity requires the more nuanced work of changing organizational culture.
It seems that it would be hard for any organization to argue about this kind of strategy. You’re talking about building the capacity of that organization to accommodate different ways of being. So, what are the barriers? Why doesn’t this happen?
If you build that capacity, diversity happens. The organization becomes an exciting place to work, and people want to work there. You’ll become a magnet for attracting all kinds of interesting, creative people.
I think one of the biggest barriers to change is the lack of accountability and an embedded sense of entitlement, especially within philanthropy. This whole business of foundations as elite institutions expecting people to cover. Also, the need to get beyond the numbers. People think, “Ok, we hired the people of color, we hired the lesbian, we hired the disabled person in the wheelchair. We’ve done it!” You know, dust your hands off, we’re finished.
Never mind that too many leave next week.
Right. Because the culture didn’t work for them. They were expected to “fit in” with little mentoring, little explanations about why things are as they are. And they didn’t feel themselves valued. Numbers are important, but numbers aren’t enough. So that’s a huge barrier, getting people to recognize that embedded sense of entitlement. Pressure to change is not going to come from mandates outside
Some of these barriers would be consistent across organization types, but it sounds like there’s something specific to philanthropy here.
Well, most organizations expect new people to cover to fit in. But because we give away money, in philanthropy by definition we’re in a power relationship with our client that’s different from most other organizations. That “by definition” easily becomes an unacknowledged setup for a kind of power elite, and that’s a hard thing for a lot of organizations to name or acknowledge.
If there’s one key message that you would like people, especially philanthropy leaders, to take from your work, what would it be?
I would argue that taking these issues seriously provides expanded resources and sources of new energy and creativity. It’s a real plus. Institutionalizing diversity can be exciting and can improve both the organization itself and the work. The work is really about getting healthy as organizations and being able to respond quickly to change. It’s not an onerous task: it’s exciting.
How has your book been received? What kind of feedback have you gotten?
The reviews have been mainly positive. But it simply takes time to get this kind of consciousness out there. The great news is that last fall, we won the Hodgkinson Research Prize for the best book on philanthropy in the non-profit sector that influences policy and practice. So that should help these ideas from the book gain some more traction. I also hear the phrase deep diversity being used more frequently, and that’s exciting, since it encapsulates what we’re trying to do: embed diversity deep within an organization’s culture.
And what is the next frontier? Where do you want to go next?
I think the next round of work is developing more sophisticated tools to help organizations DO the work. There aren’t a lot of tools out there for this. Plus we need to build regional leadership groups that help each other use this energy to improve philanthropy across the sector.
Diversity nirvana doesn’t exist. It’s an ongoing process. The goal is not “Bingo, we did it!” Instead, we need redundant mechanisms in place within an organization that allows it to feed and sustain itself as a vital culture with history and traditions, but also to welcome new learning. Which basically means you’re teaching people how to “stay in the question.”