St. Louis American Photojournalist Wiley Price and I attended part of the World Diversity Leadership Summit “Diversity 2012 and Beyond” on Oct. 2, hosted at Edward Jones’ headquarters.
When we got back to the office, we started watching people’s hand motions, their eye movements and how they emphasized their words. We wanted to determine if they were sending the “micromessages.”
“Micromessages are those subtle – and sometimes not-so-subtle – nonverbal messages that people send through body language, tone of voice and the way they inflect words,” said keynote speaker and micro-inequities expert Steve Young, to an audience of 600 corporate and government officials. “Micromessages signal at an immediate gut level how people feel about each other.”
And those messages can create “micro-inequities” or “micro-advantages.”
It’s not a secret that body language is a large part of how we communicate. However, when put in the frame of equality and diversity, these messages offer a tangible way to observe tendencies and to create a more inclusive environment.
In its eighth year, the two-day World Diversity Leadership Summit offered practices – rather than checklists – that leaders could use to address complex challenges, opportunities and risks related to local and global diversity and inclusion management. This year, about 200 senior global executives from the world’s leading corporations attended the conference.
In one of his examples of micromessaging, Young pretended to be a boss introducing two of his employees to another executive. For the first employee, Young offered a long technical explanation of the person’s job description; he pointed at the employee with a casual “hitch-hiker thumb;” and he did not look at the employee during the introduction. For the second employee, Young gave a shorter description but he used more adjectives to describe the employee’s work, such as “creative” and “exciting.” His eye contact acted as a bridge, connecting the two people being introduced. And he patted the employee on the back.
Though both were technically correct and met the “checklist” of a good leader, the person hearing the introductions would immediately know which employee was the more valued.
“As it relates to the workplace, it’s potential,” Young said. “You see people and you define them and we confine them. When we deal with people, we want to try and figure out, ‘what else am I not seeing?’”
Author and motivational speaker Stedman Graham also spoke on Oct. 3, and was introduced by Sharon Harvey-Davis, chief diversity officer and VP at Ameren.
Panelists in various breakout sessions at the event included: Sharon Harvey-Davis, Emily Pitts, principal of inclusion and diversity at Edward Jones; Chris Tabourne, assistant VP of corporate diversity at Enterprise Rent-A-Car; and Reena Hajat Carroll, executive director of the Diversity Awareness Partnership.
The event was sponsored by several local groups, including Edward Jones, Ameren Corporation, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and The Diversity Awareness Partnership.
“In a business world that is increasingly Pan-global, where the lines between culture, commerce and community are increasingly blurred,” said Douglas Freeman, founder of the summit and CEO of Virtcom Consulting, “the organizations which are best positioned to deal with this new reality stand the best chance of prospering.”
