23 Sep 2022
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What can storytelling teach your leaders about diversity and inclusion?

Margit Vunder
By Margit Vunder

Associate Director, Diversity & Inclusion project lead | EY Switzerland

Organizational transformation - people and culture, behavioral economy, change management, D&I and wellbeing | next to equality, passionate about theater and Russian literature.

23 Sep 2022
Related topics Diversity, equity and inclusiveness Corporate culture Purpose Inclusive growth
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EY harnesses the power of storytelling to build psychological safety and support a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace.

In brief
  • Creating a psychologically safe space is crucial to enable diversity, equity and inclusion.
  • Storytelling encourages a shift in perspective and allows leaders to sidestep action bias and focus instead on how they can help.
  • Insights from EY’s best-practice storytelling initiative can help other organizations build leadership awareness of others’ experiences.

Organizations are increasingly focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion – and the topic has evolved rapidly in recent years. At EY, we’ve been working to promote diversity and inclusion on many levels and continue our journey toward our long-term goal of gender equality across all ranks. In this article – inspired by our piece in the Gender Intelligence Report 2022 – we share our insights into storytelling as a way to build a psychologically safe environment. This is an important condition to reap the benefits of diversity and making inclusion and equity a reality.

For the minority to be included, the majority must adapt their behavior. But changing behavior is difficult, especially if the need to change benefits someone else. By making the change relational, people are differently engaged and committed to change. Storytelling is one of the most powerful forms of communication; it grabs our attention, raises empathy and open new perspectives. At EY, we use storytelling to build an equitable and inclusive culture that naturally encourages women to pursue the upward path. Our experience is that storying achieves this by:

  1. Highlighting barriers which still need to be removed to achieve greater inclusion, equity and diversity by raising leadership awareness of different experiences in the workplace
  2. Building psychological safety and encourage open and honest conversations

To help the compelling stories of our women be told and heard, we have embedded storytelling into our leadership development program. Hearing true stories from real colleagues raises awareness, allows leaders to explore experiences through a different lens, and makes building psychological safety part of the leadership culture.

We fail to listen to people and understand why they feel the way they do and tend instead to focus on “fixing” them. What was well-intentioned leaves people feeling unheard and, worse, misunderstood.
Margit Vunder
Associate Director, Diversity & Inclusion project lead | EY Switzerland

One of the obstacles that keeps us from achieving greater diversity, equity and inclusion is our tendency to want to fix things (action bias). Here this sought-after leadership characteristic can prove to be a double-edged sword and keep us from doing the “right” things. We fail to listen to people and understand why they feel the way they do and tend instead to focus on “fixing” them by telling them to feel differently, see things differently, act differently. We rarely ask what they might need to help the situation at hand, but rather rush to provide advice, generally driven from our own experiences. What was well-intentioned leaves people feeling unheard and, worse, misunderstood. As a result, they become less and less confident in expressing their opinions or sharing their feelings. 

  • Storytelling at EY – an eye-opening experience

    We held a two-hour virtual workshop for our extended leadership team to develop awareness around action bias and to provide them with tools and ideas on how to mitigate it. It included data on diversity progression (retention, promotion), storytelling (two women and one man who shared how flexible working works for them) and role-playing (learning to listen to people, hearing them out, and understanding them rather than trying to “fix” them) - an eye-opening experience according to the feedback received from our leaders. In this setting, storytelling helped make different experiences visible and established emotional connection between participants – a key component for transformational change around diversity, equity and inclusion.

    In a separate step, we invited 20 male leaders to participate as audience members at our three-hour virtual female leadership development event called POWER Up, where the 80 women shared their experiences and perspectives on topics such as projecting confidence, owning their careers, widening networks, elevating communication and realizing purpose.

    The male leaders found listening to these stories eye-opening. According to the feedback received, understanding why this really matters for female colleagues leads to a different motivation and commitment to adjust one's own behaviors and mindsets.  

According to David G. Smith and W. Brand Johnson, authors of “Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace”, asking the following questions can be helpful for men:

  • I am curious about some of the things women in our organization find most challenging day to day, things that I – as a man – might not notice. Would you feel comfortable sharing some of the challenges you encounter most often?
  • If there was one thing you wish men/women who work here were more aware of, something they could do, stop doing, or do more of that would improve the experience of the people they work with, what would that be?
  • If there was one thing, I could become more aware of, perhaps one thing I could start doing every day that might make the workplace more inclusive, what would that be?

And women, too, can accelerate inclusion, equity and diversity in the workplace through their behavior and choice of words:

  • Become an ally for male colleagues. Help them see and understand female perspective by sharing your stories and share feedback in a two-way conversation.
  • Success has a lot to do with confidence – help those who have less of it by celebrating their strength and backing them up in the meetings. 
  • Be open with other women about your setbacks and vulnerabilities. It gives them the courage to continue pursuing their goals if they didn’t make a success of something first time around.

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Summary

Action bias can be a real issue at leadership level as the desire to “fix” problems blocks efforts to truly listen. Using storytelling as a tool is something that everyone at every level can do, inside but also outside of an organization, to help women thrive and succeed. Each of us has the power to join conversations where stories can be told and heard. Each of us can stand up, speak out, and take action for diversity, equity and inclusion. 

About this article

Margit Vunder
By Margit Vunder

Associate Director, Diversity & Inclusion project lead | EY Switzerland

Organizational transformation - people and culture, behavioral economy, change management, D&I and wellbeing | next to equality, passionate about theater and Russian literature.

Related topics Diversity, equity and inclusiveness Corporate culture Purpose Inclusive growth
Upvote