Business English: Can I change upper class, white male corporate culture?

A male manager (early 40s) wrote: I am a senior expatriate manager in a privately held Asian company. Our British parent company employs graduates from the UK as generalists on a fast-track programme. Their hiring has an emphasis on upper class, white males from private schools. ...

... We have no women in senior positions, and the only two openly gay managers left last year. The levels of conformity were highlighted when more than 20 of my colleagues turned up completely intoxicated to a recent sporting event identically dressed as Mexicans.

What can I do to change the corporate culture?

Read what Lucy Kellaway, "agony-aunt" of the Financial Times (London), answered:

You don't say why you object to this conformity, as if you expect the reason to be self-explanatory. I can see that being surrounded by posh, guffawing lads could be annoying if you aren't young, posh and guffawing yourself. But beyond that, you need to be more specific. Are these spoilt young generalists any good? Is the company successful? I can think of a large number of organisations that were founded on hiring spectacularly undiverse workforces: the army, the City of London, P&G, McKinsey, Microsoft, all of French industry, even the Financial Times was a few decades ago overweight in just the sort of person you mention.

Lucy Kellaway

There are good things about homogeneity: communication is easy and things can be accomplished with focus and speed. There are also bad things about it: narrowness, mediocrity, and an inability to spot disaster approaching.

What does it to the company?

What you need to do is think about the particular damage (if any) that this hiring policy does to the company. When you have come up with a good case you need to get the ear of the CEO. This may be tricky: If he hires in this mould, I trust it's a mould he sprung from himself, and is therefore rather attached to.

Your campaign has no chance of working unless he trusts and likes you; though if this were the case I suspect you would have gone direct to him rather than to me. Therefore you need to find a few allies who are close to him and lobby them. It's going to require a great deal of effort, and chances of success are quite slim.

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Try to expose them to different cultures

The lesser challenge is to try to make your young charges less laddish through an elaborate regime of persuasion and punishment. Expose them to different cultures, break up the cliques, tell them off when they guffaw too hard. The trouble with this approach is that it doesn't solve the root problem, and it would turn you into a school master, which I doubt is what you joined the company to become.

It's going to be a very long hard slog. If, as I said at the outset, your main objection is that you don't find this coach load of public school boys especially congenial as work mates, the best solution for you would be to go somewhere else where people are cut from not just one cloth but from many.

Aus: The Financial Times, London. www.ft.com