Performative Allyship Looks Good but Genuine Trust Takes Time

by Ron Pegram

Over the last four years, I’ve researched minority entrepreneurship and how a minority entrepreneurs’ lack of trust for banking systems impacts their willingness to borrow. As you might imagine, many minority entrepreneurs self-select out of the banking system, even when they need funding, if they don’t believe that banking systems are fair and trustworthy. After concluding my dissertation, I began to ponder the effects a similar lack of trust for corporate initiatives and policies might have for so many brilliant Black employees, who are locked out of the top echelons of the companies they helped to build. The result is this article, which reviews the benefits of trust, how trust is established, and ends with a call to action for corporate America to move beyond performative measures and begin real partnership with Black America.

RON PEGRAM – is currently a Vice-President and General Manager for Federal Signal, Inc., and is an adjunct lecturer of management at several universities.

UUNDOUBTEDLY SPURRED BY THE SOCIAL UNREST during the summer of 2020, many well-known and large corporations took to social media to declare their support for Black Lives Matter, diversity, and equality. The collective message seemed to be, “We get it; it’s time for a change; you can trust us.” This is lovely sentiment, but, as we all know, true change takes time, and it is much harder to implement change than it is to craft messages. Unsurprisingly, many of my colleagues and friends maintain a healthy amount of skepticism in the face of so many companies pledging support. It all looks good but where do we go from here?

I think we should begin with trust. Let’s assume that companies are being genuine with their supportive messages in the wake of 2020. Let’s also assume that those companies would like to build more trusting relationships with their Black employees. The questions we should then ask as leaders and stakeholders are many. Why does a company want a trusting environment? What are the benefits of trust within an organization? How do we build and maintain trust? Finally, what is trust exactly? The benefits of trust within an organization are profound Perhaps my favorite definition of trust comes from Earle, who suggested that trust is the willingness to make oneself vulnerable in the expectation of munificence.1 Said differently, this is someone taking a leap of faith because they expect to be supported. Such a leap of faith within a corporate setting might include sharing innovative ideas with teammates and managers, doing work beyond your current scope of responsibilities, or even having emotionally supportive relationships with coworkers and managers because you assume that the benefits of the firm will be distributed fairly.

At a macro-level, trust is an engine of growth for a company. When there is trust between team members, the cost of doing business is lower and transactions happen faster. This is because trust reduces the need for contracts between people.2 A contract is a detailed, written specification that attempts to consider all possibilities. Although most of us are familiar with contracts that we sign to purchase a house or car, we also make verbal contracts with our managers regularly, and usually of the “So if I am willing to do this extra work for you, it should lead to this positive outcome for me...” variety. Rarely are those agreements written out explicitly, but trust reduces the need for them to be so formal. If everything doesn’t need to be spelled out completely, then a team can move faster as its members have faith that praise, and recognition will be awarded with equity.

Trust also correlates strongly with one’s faith in the rule of law, whether that of a nation or company.3 When I believe I am

generally being supported within a group, I am also more willing to subject myself to being adjudicated by that group. Within a corporation, we can think of the rule of law being the company’s human resources policies and procedures. Without trust, it is likely that I’d have zero faith in the company’s HR group to have my back if ever needed or to even evaluate me fairly. The constructive criticism in my evaluation that seems helpful today in a trusting environment could resonate with me very differently tomorrow in an untrustworthy setting.

Sharing best practices and innovative ideas also requires trust between partners.4 Innovative ideas are often one of the best ways for team members to get noticed, especially within larger organizations. It takes faith for team members to propagate their good ideas for saving the corporation money, or growing the company’s sales, if they are not confident that some credit for the innovation will return to them in the form of increased career mobility.

Although basic, the above evidence suggests at least a rudimentary questionnaire for anyone to use to discern their own trust in their current employer. Do you believe that your efforts to go above and beyond are noticed by your manager and senior leaders? Are you given credit for them? Do you trust that if you were treated unfairly, your current company’s HR leadership and policies could support you? Are you willing to share your best ideas with peers and managers because you believe you’ll be awarded proper credit? How many would answer yes to all? For those who honestly answer no to one or more of the questions, how much is your company losing from you because of the lack of a trusting environment. My guess is a lot. Developing and maintaining trust requires a review of power and equity Although most firms would probably go on record as saying that they try to foster a trustworthy team environment, the reality of that is complex in any scenario in which a majority group is asking a minority group to trust them. This is even more complex

if the minority group is disproportionately underrepresented in leadership, because trust is sensitive to power imbalances and social distance between people.

Power imbalances occur when one partner in a transaction has less dependence on the other than the other has on them. In such a scenario, the relatively weaker of the two is often motivated to trust the more powerful for reasons of hope. However, high levels of power have been shown to decrease the willingness of the more powerful partner to act in trustworthy fashion.5

Social distance occurs when a person is not easily accessible to another within a network. Businesspeople often turn to their networks when they need to access resources that they themselves may not have. In a corporate setting, you can think of an example of social distance as the theoretical space between a manager and the company’s CEO. Would a front-line manager feel comfortable communicating their concerns directly to the CEO, or would the manager feel compelled to use multiple channels of intermediate communication? Just as is the case with power imbalances, trust can be very sensitive to social distance between people.6 We tend to trust more when we can more freely interact without fear of judgment or of exclusion.

If we apply this to many corporate settings, we can start to form a framework in which to view the average transaction between Black and white team-members. You can evaluate how likely power imbalances are to exist by asking whether it is typical that a Black team-member of Company A would have a position, authority, and title commensurate with their expertise and accomplishments when compared to a white team-member of Company A. You can evaluate how likely social distances are to exist by evaluating how likely it is that a white team-member from Company A would need the support of a Black team-member from Company A to implement certain corporate initiatives. If the answer to either is “not likely,” then research suggests the Black team-member may be hopeful that their white colleagues will act with munificence, but the white team-member has very little corporate incentive to

do so. They have the power and the connections that their Black colleague does not.

Many companies will try to address these power imbalances and social distances by making high-profile hires of talented and deserving senior Black leaders. This is to be commended and encouraged, especially given that just few Black CEOs exist across the S&P 5007. However, it is not enough. Trust is both a collective and individual decision. A company that selects high-profile hires of senior Black leaders but does nothing to address power imbalances and social distances in its rank-and-file management team will still have issues with trust.

One way to explain this is to borrow the concept of ergodicity from economics. Ergodicity is used in economics to explain how a person views the benefits of a scenario based on the average outcome for all members. If I believe that my outcome is likely to be similar to the average outcome for all participants who have similar attributes to my own (education, accomplishments, experience), then I’m likely to view my involvement with that scenario more positively. If I don’t believe my outcome is likely to resemble the average, and, in fact is likely to be worse, I will make a very different decision. High-profile hires are needed but may do nothing to address fundamental power imbalances and social distances that happen daily between Black and white teammembers of a company. Specific tensions between Black and white people in a corporate setting The review of power imbalances, social distances, and equity that I recommend above really should happen whenever one group is the majority in a group setting, and a minority group has talent and skills to contribute. However, in the United States, there are specific tensions that persist between Black and white people in corporate settings that go far beyond the majority/minority paradigm.

To begin, the historical patterns of racial segregation and discrimination that extend beyond work settings, to how our

communities are designed, have left many Black Americans unsure of how much trust to place in the current system.8 This distrust is not unwarranted and has certain benefits. Research shows that healthy skepticism of white team-members can help Black team-members detect disingenuous motives from others.9

In addition, many white people express discomfort when there is a growing concentration of Black people within a community or group,10 and tend to negotiate more harshly and seek less mutually favorable outcomes when they are negotiating with Black team-members.11 These various aggressions, both micro- and macro- in nature, can leave Black team-members uncomfortable with their authenticity and uncomfortable discussing bias in the workplace.12 When groups don’t trust each other, trust for institutions suffers as well People are not just asked to trust other people when they are employed by a corporation. They are asked to trust the institutions of a corporation as well. I can remember an uncle telling me how his company “…always did right by him.” When he spoke of the company, he spoke of it as if it were a person and that’s because he trusted the company as an institution with rules and fairness.

But when people don’t trust other people, this institutional trust is lower as well. One of the many academic theories on trust suggests that within a community, there are really three types of trust: personal (this is between you and people you perceive to be like you), interpersonal (this is between you and other groups that are different from you), and institutional (this is between you and the systems of a group).13 When interpersonal trust, or trust between different groups, is low, institutional trust declines. The analogy for corporations is very clear. If your environment is not one in which the minority group can easily trust the majority group, the minority group’s trust for the institutions of your company will be low as well.

What does corporate America need to do? First, establish a change in attitudes Remember that this is an American issue, and that Black teammembers have been experiencing both overt and implicit racism for hundreds of years. To solve this problem will require leadership from the most senior managers of our top corporations. It simply is not fair to expect the rank-and-file managers of a company to make things fairer by themselves when they, themselves, are operating in an environment of power imbalance.

Also, empathy is required. I recently read a letter from a white CEO that stated that the CEO was sure that their company was doing all it could in the wake of social unrest. While perhaps good-intentioned, the reality is that white managers often miss instances of racial discrimination, as Black team-members are five times more likely to report work-place discrimination than white team-members.14 Simply believing that a company is free of racism and discrimination, while simultaneously belonging to the majority in-power group, is hopeful at best and willfully blind at worst.

Perhaps most importantly, companies need to begin to replace platitudes with action. The various messages that have come up in the wake of the summer of 2020 may be in the right spirit but performative allyship without real commitment advances no cause. It merely creates fatigue for all of us. Second, set a course of action! If we can allow ourselves the right empathy and commitment, there are certain actions companies can take right now to create greater trust. One of the most important of these actions is a review of the power imbalances that exist not just in top leadership positions but across the company. The issue facing Black Americans in corporate settings is no longer just one of diversity and the benefits from it, but a moral issue of years of underrepresentation. Many companies will make appointments of deserving Black leaders to senior ranks and to their boards, but

how many will take the time to go through their actual teams to ask themselves the following: ■ Are Black team-members proportionately represented at all levels of supervisory positions? ■ Are Black team-members proportionately represented at all levels of developmental opportunities and training? ■ Are Black team-members proportionately represented in all important initiatives and corporate projects? ■ Have we recognized the educational achievements, tenure, and accomplishments of our Black team-members in such a way to produce equity across the various positions of the company?

Actions taken to correct those imbalances where they exist can help. But remember, trust not only diminishes in environments of power imbalances, but also when there is social distance from one group to another. To mitigate unwanted social distances, we can consider who can be the friends and associates of the top management team at work. Everyone has seen the effects that informal work relationships can have on a career, and yet research suggests that Black mentee and white mentor relationships typically only work well when the Black mentee is willing to suppress salient racial identity.15 That is unfair and an example of social distance – the person with power opting to only engage in their terms and not being accommodating of the power and perception imbalance. For this to change for the better, senior white mentors must do three things – find the moral courage to genuinely mentor Black team-members, display the empathy and patience to listen, and consider changing all the instances of unfairness they learn of from their mentee.

Without real action to combat inequity, Black team-members should be cautious of their trust of their employers. And without the full commitment and trust of Black team-members, most major corporations simply cannot optimize their results. In the wake of 2020, the onus is now on corporate America. If you want Black America’s trust, then earn it!

Notes:

1 – Earle, T.C. (2009). Trust, confidence, and the 2008 global financial crisis. Risk Analysis, 29(6), 785-792. https://doi.org/20.1111/j.1539-6924.2009.01230.x 2 – Reiersen, J. (2017). Trust as a booster. Journal of Business Economics and Management, 18(4), 585-598. https://doi.org/10.3846/16111699.2017.1334228 3 – Bjornskov, C. (2012). How does social trust affect economic growth? Southern Economic Journal, 78(4), 1346-1368. 4 – Chen, Y., Lin, T., Yen, D. C., (2014). How to facilitate inter-organizational knowledge sharing: the impact of trust. Information & Management, 51, 568-578. 5 – Schlke, O., Reimann, M., & Cook, K. S., (2015). Power decreases trust in social exchange. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(42), 12950 – 12955 6 – Kwon, S., & Adler, P. S., (2014). Social capital: maturation of a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 39 (4), 412-422. 7 – Malloy, R. & Cortese, A. (2019) Inequality in the workplace: the conversation that won’t end. Briefings Magazine. Available online at https://www.kornferry.com/insights/articles/inequality-in-the-workplace-theconversation-that-wont-end 8 – Smith, S., S. (2010). Race and Trust. Annual Review of Sociology, 36(2010), 453-475. 9 – LaCosse, J., Tuscherer, T., Kuntsman, J. W., Plant, E. A., Trawalter, S. & Major, B. (2015). Suspicion of white people’s motives relates to relative accuracy in detecting external motivation to respond without prejudice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61 (2015), 1-4. 10 – Rudolph, T. J., & Popp, E. (2010). Race, environment, and interracial trust. The Journal of Politics, 72(1), 74-89. 11 – Oore, D. G., Gagnon, A., & Bourgeois, D. (2013). When white feels right: the effects of in-group affect and race of partner on negotiation performance. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 6 (2), 94-113. 12 – Roberts, L. M., & Mayo, A. J. (2019). Toward a racially just workplace. Harvard Business Review. Available online at https://hbr.org/2019/11/toward-a-racially-just-workplace 13 – Buriak, A., Voznakova, I., Sulkowska, J., & Kryvych, Y. (2019). Social trust and institutional (bank) trust: empirical evidence of interaction. Economics & Society. 12 (4), 116-129. 14 – Society of Human Resource Management. (2020). Together forward at work. Available online at https://togetherforwardatwork.shrm.org/?utm_source=shrm_article&utm_medium=shrm.org&utm_ campaign=communications~together_forward~press_release 15 – Thomas, D. A. (1993). Racial dynamics in cross-race developmental relationships. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38 (2), 169-194.