Many of us pull up the career ladder when we should be putting it down and allowing others to climb up. That was one theme of the recent Anthony Howitt lecture in London, in sentiment shared specifically by Baroness Floella Benjamin, a member of the House of Lords.
One cause of professionals failing to extend the career ladder to others, according to Sarah Atkinson, CEO at the Social Mobility Foundation, is familiarity bias. Often, those who get the best projects at work are the people leaders have worked with before, she said. This means that outsiders have a harder time working on such assignments.
Okorie Ramsey, CPA, CGMA, AICPA chair and co-chair of the board of directors at AICPA & CIMA, together as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, echoed those thoughts.
“We always want to go after what is familiar, because it’s comfortable,” he said, urging the audience during a panel discussion to “mentor someone or sponsor someone who doesn’t look like you”. Ramsey said he has found that people often find they have more in common with each other than they have different from each other.
Benjamin focused her speech on the theme of three C’s that are needed for social equity: consideration, contentment, and confidence.
“The first C is for consideration,” Benjamin said. “To put yourself in the place of others, to have empathy and understanding, to see what’s missing. Not to be judgemental, for you never know what people are going through.”
Contentment relates to the inclination to stand on others to succeed, to become envious and discontented. Put the ladder down, she said, and let others come up.
Confidence is the final cog, she said, “the confidence to be a decent human being, the confidence to know every disappointment as an appointment with something better”.
For Asif Sadiq, chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at Warner Bros. Discovery, confidence is synonymous with authenticity. Being your authentic self, Sadiq said, liberates you, and there’s never a timeframe on it.
“I spent the majority of my life trying to be like everyone else,” he said. “But I had my own unique attributes, my own unique skills that never shined, never flourished because I was trying to fit in.”
Organisations need to create workplaces where people belong, where they feel a sense of belonging, and where they can bring their authentic self, Sadiq said.
Progress comes to the workplace when words become actions, said Alfred Ramosedi, FCMA, CGMA, CEO at Bayport Financial Services. He advised that people be intentional when pursuing outcomes, not apologetic.
“If you volunteer to go fix the things, then people understand,” he said. “Because we’ve got a lot of people [sitting on the sidelines] who can talk, who tell us what the problems are, but very few volunteers say this is going to be fixed.”
— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
