Want To Achieve The Optimal Inclusive Leadership Level?
Through the Orange lens, leaders see the world as an assemblage of separable, permanent, well-defined objects and forces to be manipulated in the service of human needs.
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Recognize Your Baseline
At Beyond Inclusion Group, we’re committed to awakening each leader and organization’s full potential by working toward the Teal level of the Evolutionary Guide to DEI where personal and shared accountability foster inclusion. But first we’ll need to identify your current center of gravity or baseline level. To help with this, in our last blog we covered two of the other four leadership orientations preceding that Evolutionary Purpose-Driven (Teal) level —Impulsive (Red) and Hierarchical (Amber)—and took note of the negative impact these long-standing, pervasive management approaches can have on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts. This blog is dedicated to understanding the next level: Meritocracy (Orange).
Orange Is Not The New Lens
The Orange leadership orientation initially emerged during the Renaissance among small groups of scientists and artists. It was more broadly adopted about 300 years ago during the Industrial Age, giving place to the Scientific Revolution. It is a mindset that values individualism, materialism, cause and effect, prediction and control, objectivity, rationality, strategy, technology and innovation, competition, self-reliance, performance, achievement, and profitability.
This all sounds great, right? Not so fast!
Through the Orange lens, leaders see the world as an assemblage of separable, permanent, well-defined objects and forces to be manipulated in the service of human needs. It is the most commonly preferred and highly rewarded way of leading and organizing in much of Western culture:
“By most modern Western expectations, fully functional adults see and treat reality as something preexistent and external to themselves made up of permanent, well- defined objects that can be analyzed, investigated, and controlled for our benefit. This view is based on a maximal separation between subject and object, thinker and thought. It epitomizes the traditional scientific frame of mind that is concerned with control, measurement and prediction.”
– Ego Development: Nine Levels of Increasing Embrace; Susan R. Cook-Grueter, Ed.D.
This deeply entrenched approach to leadership has profoundly transformed humanity over the last two centuries, granting us unparalleled levels of prosperity—but also reinforcing systemic inequities.
The Orange worldview profoundly shapes prevalent management practices and shows up in MBA programs to this day, so it’s still widely represented in modern global corporations and Wall Street banks. However, the quest for inclusion requires us to acknowledge its advantages while moving past the limitations of this sometimes clever yet problematic management approach.
The hallmarks of organizations that operate at the Orange level are innovation, accountability and meritocracy. These may sound like positive qualities at first glance, but a closer look reveals that these are often double-edged swords undercutting the evolution of leaders and organizations toward inclusion.
Diversity Only Takes Us So Far
Those with the Orange worldview are cognizant enough to doubt authority and question group norms. They live in a world full of possibilities and often challenge and seek ways to refine the status quo.
In their constant quest to improve, Orange-minded leaders emphasize change, efficiency and innovation. They see diversity as a competitive advantage and focus on recruitment to attract diverse talent. Within Orange organizations, DEI is viewed as a numbers game rather than a strategy for necessary cultural transformation. But the reality is that diversity is only part of the puzzle. Unfortunately, Orange organizations often fail to recognize that diversity without equity and inclusion won’t actually attract, retain, or fully engage diverse talent, foster innovation, or drive business growth. Instead, they experience a “revolving door issue” with regard to cultivating talented Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC).
Merit Can’t Be Enough
The Orange mindset has contributed positively to social justice in the sense that it departed from the caste system and provided opportunities for some people to more freely choose occupations compatible with their needs, aspirations and aptitudes. In principle and theory, anyone can move up the corporate ladder in an Orange organization regardless of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc. While this signals advancement from a DEI perspective, the bigger picture is much more complicated.
A looming shadow cast by the Orange worldview is its failure to recognize that the playing field is not always level and some individuals have inherent advantages associated with their economic standing and social identities. This ignores the societal and historical factors and hierarchies of privilege that put individuals from minority and marginalized groups such as women, Blacks and Latinx at an economic and professional disadvantage. As with diversity, merit is only part of the story.
A Competition Where Everyone Loses Out?
The emphasis on competition in the Orange mindset also subverts inclusion. As we’ve discussed before, inclusion generates business productivity through authentic collaboration and genuine teamwork. Promoting the (spoken or unspoken) goal of doing better or achieving more than coworkers or attaining perfection simply does not make for effective teams or lasting results.
For similar reasons, the focus on individualism through the Orange leadership lens is also a major hindrance. While DEI research recognizes that each person needs to be empowered and uniquely valued in order to fulfill their potential, respect for individual talent only has resonance in the context of belonging within the group. It’s the connections with others through our contributions–not isolated individual performance–that makes for happier, more successful and productive workers in an inclusive workplace.
And when employees are constantly hustling to get ahead of one another while struggling to meet another benchmark, they run into unmanageable workloads and personal stress associated with extreme job dissatisfaction and eventual burnout. This is especially worrisome in the context of the pandemic, where already marginalized workers are facing more challenges than ever in balancing work and personal obligations while trying to sustain viable, satisfying livelihoods. Unsurprisingly, this brings us right back to the “revolving door” problem for retention mentioned earlier.
The Future Is Teal
Now hopefully you’re getting the picture— considering the Red, Amber, and Orange levels in the Evolutionary Guide to DEI helps us understand how widespread leadership practices came about and persist, but there’s even more to learn from them about what not to do as an inclusive leader of the future. Recognizing traits of yourself or your organization in these levels is not a sign of failure, but an important clue about where progress is possible! Our next blog will examine the Green (Values Morals Driven) level to further distinguish the common, often well-intentioned but outdated leadership models that inclusive organizations learn how to evolve beyond.
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