The Important Steps Before Launching Diversity Programs

Why Mentees Should Highlight Similarities with Mentors

By Daniel Butcher

While high-quality mentorship boosts protégés’ careers, a mentor who is disinterested or unmotivated doesn’t provide value to mentees. To maximize mentors’ networking help and advice, mentees should highlight similarities with their mentor to strengthen mutual identification.

Academy of Management Scholar Bess Rouse of Boston College, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article with Beth Humberd of the University of Massachusetts Lowell on this topic, said that the effectiveness of mentoring depends on the mentor identifying with a mentee to form a close relationship.

“It has been interesting to watch the shift of people understanding more about this network structure and broader constellation of developmental relationships,” Rouse said. “One of the big pieces of advice that a lot of people would give is don’t look for the be-all and end-all of a mentor that’s going to do all of these different functions for you.

“It’s really diversifying networking and career-development efforts and understanding that different people have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to professional relationships,” she said.“Some people are much better at psychosocial support, the trust and friendship part of a mentoring relationship, whereas some people are much better at the career side of it and giving sponsorship opportunities or challenging you or reading your work.

“Those benefits of mentorship can come from a range of different people.”

Talking about pastimes cultivates identification

People enjoy talking about their pastimes and things they have in common with each other. Mentors are no exception.

“Think about not only how we are similar in terms of our work experience or where we want to go, but also commonalities as simple as like hobbies—if you find somebody who plays tennis and you play tennis, use that as a conversation-starter,” Rouse said. “Think about how you can develop an easygoing relationship that then can build into a mentoring relationship.

“You shouldn’t underestimate those various forms of connection that you might use for networking and relationship-building, and think about doing those in small doses, rather than thinking, ‘I’m going to find my mentor today’—it’s establishing a good rapport with potential mentors,” she said. “There’s a whole body of literature on positive work relationships and high-quality connections—ask yourself how you can build smaller connections into bigger relationships.

“Especially as an introvert, thinking about having those particular strong, high-quality connections is what ends up building into those valuable mentoring relationships.”

Why Some People with Mental Disorders Thrive as Entrepreneurs

By Daniel Butcher

Symptoms and traits associated with certain mental disorders, including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, dyslexia, and autism, may help entrepreneurs and other businesspeople succeed, noted Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.

Shepherd said that conditions that might be seen as a negative, particularly in employment, can sometimes be an advantage in entrepreneurship.

“Some mental disorders are perceived to negatively impact reliability in traditional nine-to-five employment but can actually be an asset in entrepreneurship,” Shepherd said. “Research has found that people with dyslexia tend to have weaker aspects in their left hemisphere of their brain, but their right hemisphere is stronger, and so therefore they can enter entrepreneurship and be successful in it.

“We have the statistics to say that the people with dyslexia are more likely to become entrepreneurs than the general population—in fact, it’s true for many groups who feel like they’re constrained in being promoted in corporate employment turned to self-employment or entrepreneurship,” he said.

“That includes minorities, marginalized groups, and people with all sorts of disabilities, for example, women and immigrants, because they feel like they have constraints or face discrimination in the workplace and that they don’t have those as much in entrepreneurship.”

Research has found that people with ADHD are more likely to become entrepreneurs.

“People with ADHD are more prepared to engage in risk taking, they’re more proactive, and they’re more innovative, and we also found that people with autism are actually getting used by companies engaging in software testing, because they have some advantages in being able to test software,” Shepherd said.

“Entrepreneurship may cause some mental disorders through high stress or loss when a business fails, which can be an important point to consider when deciding on your career path, but people with disorders are also drawn to entrepreneurship,” he said.

Your Skills, Not Your Jobs, Are Part of Your Identity

By Daniel Butcher

Rather than focusing on job titles or specific industries during a job search, candidates who imagine how their skills and experience could translate to a variety of roles are better able to bounce back after career setbacks and transition from one professional identity to another.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that research he conducted on disabled veterans found that some of them did well in transitioning to new careers after leaving the military, while others did poorly.

“The ones who did poorly looked at superficial links between their previous jobs in the military and the civilian jobs they were considering: ‘I was a sniper in the army; we don’t need anyone to be a sniper in in civilian life but the police use weapons’ or ‘I used to drive a tank. What can I do in civilian life? I can drive a bus,’” Shepherd said.

“But other people—the ones who did well—looked at it more structurally and said, ‘In the military, I learned discipline; I learned to be able to attend to important responsibilities for an extended period of time; I learned how to follow orders and execute those things at a structural level, which means that in entrepreneurship, I can do X and Y,’” he said.

For example, the newspaper, magazine, and publishing industries have been disrupted by the transition from print to digital advertising, the availability of free content, the rise of social media and AI, and other factors, which has lead to a structural decline in the number of jobs in those areas.

“This concept relates to the media landscape; if you lose a career in journalism, you could say, ‘Okay, I could find something that superficially matches my professional identity, such as PR [public relations] or media relations, or maybe journalism means other things: ‘I’m an investigator’ or ‘I’m a writer who’s a subject-matter expert on these things—what could that lead to?’” Shepherd said.

“And it might lead to something that on the surface looks like something very different but that structurally uses the same skills that you used in your previous career,” he said.

“The advice is to try and look at things not just superficially but rather at a deeper level and consider how your skills can transfer to a different career and professional identity.”

Want to Bounce Back from a Setback? Try Identity Play

By Daniel Butcher

People who can approach job searches with a flexible mindset about their professional identity are better able to bounce back after devastating job losses or even injuries that affect the types of jobs they’re able to do.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that if people get fired or laid off, butt heir job is not a critical part of their identity, then they can often recover relatively quickly. But many people’s self-image is intertwined with their career.

“If you can find a job that’s kind of related to that identity, then you’re probably going to be fine, but if it was a strong part of your identity and you’re unable to capture a job that represents that identity, then you can fall a long way,” Shepherd said.

“But the interesting aspect is that when you hit rock bottom, it’s actually quite freeing—it’s like freedom when you hit the bottom, because you say, ‘It can’t get any worse,’ and suddenly, when you hit the bottom, you actually start to think more freely and can engage in this identity play,” he said.

Research on musicians and dancers who have experienced traumatic events uncovered surprising findings about self-reinvention and reimagining one’s professional identity to achieve growth in a new career.

“Professional musicians and dancers who have an injury and can no longer perform those roles that they’ve been performing their whole life and was a strong part of their identity, and also people who get injured and have become paraplegics or even quadriplegics, after a while, they can actually perform well in a different career, and they look back and say, ‘The best thing that ever happened to me was getting that injury,’ Shepherd said. “It wasn’t at that time, of course; it was devastating, but it allowed them to go and pursue something else, and that something else became what they felt was actually something better than what they were before.

“In some ways, maybe it’s better, or maybe they’re just telling themselves it was better, but either way, that’s a good thing that happened or at least a silver lining,” he said. “So I suppose that’s the advantage—when we hit rock bottom, then we can start to really pursue something else—we can play with these different identities and find something that may actually lead to an outcome that’s better than what would have happened if we had never lost that original career in the first place.”

Of course, for some, there’s a sad side to that kind of story.

“Some people engage in chronic dysfunctional behavior and take drugs and remove themselves from society and their own way of thinking after suffering a professional setback or injury,” Shepherd said. “But if you can engage in this identity play, then you can maybe find a better version of yourself.”

Immigration Debates Rarely Mention This Important Fact

By Daniel Butcher

Many immigrants—both legal and illegal—are willing to do the kinds of unglamorous, undistinguished, and downright dirty jobs that no one else wants to do, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame. He likens their psychology to that of Dalits, India’s most oppressed and stigmatized people, many of whom are garbage collectors who scavenge through slum trash dumps for items to sell. They’re commonly called “ragpickers.”

“In some ways, immigrants think like the ragpickers, because they say, ‘I’m doing this so we can eat tonight, but I’m mainly doing this so my children get educated, so that they can get a good job, so that they can marry well, and so that our family’s future generations are going to move forward,” Shepherd said. “And researchers have found that in a lot of immigrant communities, they place a high emphasis on the children’s education—and that’s the reason they’re willing to do dirty jobs.

“They come over to a new country, and they work very hard in order for their for their children to have a better education,” he said. “That’s why they immigrate in the first place, in order to have a better life for their family.”

In the United States in 2023, foreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service, natural resources, construction, and maintenance jobs, as well as production, transportation, and material moving occupations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Foreign-born workers were less likely than native-born workers to be employed in sales, office, management, professional, and related occupations.

“We spoke to ragpickers and other entrepreneurs that live in slums, and we asked them, ‘What are your personal goals?’ and they almost don’t understand the question, because their goals are all to do with the next generation,” Shepherd said. “They don’t see much hope for themselves, because when we asked them, ‘What do you plan on doing after retiring?’ they told us, ‘What retirement? I’m never going to retire.’

“It’s all about future generations, and immigrants do the same thing,” he said.

When Entrepreneurs Can’t Acknowledge Failure, Disaster Strikes

By Daniel Butcher

Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of fraud for lying about the effectiveness of the blood-testing product of her biotechnology company, Theranos, is a cautionary tale illustrating a potential downside of entrepreneurship. Unable to deal with the failure of her company’s blood-testing methods, she just plowed ahead, refusing to acknowledge the disappointing results or telling any of the investors—or anyone else—that the tests weren’t working. She pretended like everything was okay, continued to collect investor money, and built up the biotech startup to a $9 billion valuation.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that it’s common for entrepreneurs to deal with failure poorly, but investors failed to effectively scrutinize Theranos.

“A lot of the stakeholders there were maybe willfully ignorant—they wanted to believe her,” Shepherd said. “They didn’t ask probing questions; they ignored the negative signals, which is what we call a confirmation device.

“They look for information that confirms their opinions, and they discount or ignore information that disconfirms them, and so in many ways, she was negligent, but they were also negligent,” he said.

Sometimes entrepreneurs can’t even acknowledge failure to themselves, much less publicly, because their entire identity is wrapped up in success. One major failure could crack that self-image.

Shepherd said that job loss—or the failure of one’s business—can devastate a person’s sense of identity. He wrote about his research findings related to such phenomena in Hitting Rock Bottom After Job Loss: Bouncing Back to Create a New Positive Work Identity.

“Failure can have a huge impact on you psychologically, because your identity is quite often highly related to the things that you do for work, and when you lose that identity, you go into a crisis or a freefall, because you don’t know who you are anymore,” Shepherd said. “And if you don’t know who you are, you don’t know how to socially act, and it can be a very dangerous situation.”

People Use Crowdfunding to Show Compassion

By Daniel Butcher

The nonfinancial support that crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe provide via social media is crucial for raising awareness about charitable causes, entrepreneurial initiatives, and people who need help. For example, dozens of GoFundMe campaigns sprung up in the wake of a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that crowdfunding has given the world a new way to help people whose lives have been upended by disasters and tragedies.

“Another part of crowdfunding in addition to raising money was more like a social movement focused on how we prevent these things from happening again in the future,” Shepherd said.

“So in some ways, the platform provides a basis for which communities can come together and display compassion, by which we mean trying to alleviate the suffering of other people, but perhaps also create these social movements to try and change the legislation, trying to change laws to try and improve life for people,” he said.

Hundreds of millions of people have donated more than $30 billion for mostly charitable causes through GoFundMe since it launched in 2010. Budding and would-be entrepreneurs have long used the platform to try to get funding for their business ideas, but using it in such as multifaceted way to process a tragedy was rare at the time of the Parkland shooting in 2018.

“It’s a unique way of using this crowdfunding,” Shepherd said. “It was an emotional outpouring of compassion for people shattered by a crisis demonstrating that crowdfunding can also be used for that purpose in addition to trying to fund new products and new services as well—that’s interesting.”

Media Magnify Scandals of Big-Name Companies

By Daniel Butcher

Companies that dominate their industries also have to deal with increased scrutiny. Any negative news, from layoffs and unethical conduct to data breaches, get amplified and can easily become scandals, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Media attention is drawn by the accused or guilty party’s prestige, he said.

“If the perpetrator is high-reputation, they may get the benefit of the doubt for less severe misconduct as some kind of one-off thing, and the media may be less likely to cover it,” Pollock said. “But if the misconduct is severe, then the media is even more likely to scandalize the high-reputation firm’s misconduct, because we don’t expect that from high-reputation firms; it violates our expectations.

“When we have high expectations about a firm’s behavior, whether because we expect them to be more competent or act with more integrity, it’s a bigger deal and more disturbing when they violate that expectation,” he said. “That makes the incident more newsworthy to the media, increasing their coverage of the misconduct.

“These are sorts of things that we’re looking at and trying to understand: What are misconduct aspects and firm characteristics lead the misconduct to become a scandal?”

Pollock and colleagues compared the reactions to data breaches at two different companies of vastly different levels of prestige and name recognition: Facebook and Chegg, a U.S. education technology company that provides homework help, textbooks, online tutoring, and other student services.

“Facebook had a data breach of 50 million accounts; it was covered widely in the media and got lots of attention—thousands of articles were written about their data breach and the problems with it,” Pollock said. “And literally on the same day, Chegg, which is an academic software company, had a similar data breach—40 million accounts were breached, but it was barely covered outside of the the specialist media on data security, and a little bit in the in the education sector.

“So why Facebook and not Chegg? Facebook is better known,” he said. “More people use Facebook and have given them their data, so the expectancy violation is greater and possibly more personal.

“Journalists recognize this, and thus are more likely to scandalize the incident, because it attracts more readers.”

The Disconnect Between Leaders and Patients on Healthcare

By Daniel Butcher

Many people hurt by the high costs and insurance denials plaguing the U.S. healthcare industry might have been hoping that the response to the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson would lead to reforms. However, most industry executives have tried to go back to business as usual, except with heightened security for senior executives, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

In response to the waves of criticism directed at U.S. health insurance and benefits-administration executives in the wake of Thompson’s killing, most industry leaders followed a typical crisis-management playbook, including a predictable public-relations script, he said.

“They’ve been saying all the things that they always say: that they’re beholden to achieving financial goals and medical providers’ increasing costs—‘medical costs go up, and so the insurance premiums have to go up’—and that they’re doing their best to provide coverage, and all these sorts of things, the usual platitudes that they roll out,” Pollock said. “But in terms of actually making some substantive changes, they don’t do much.”

“We’re one of the only countries in the world where healthcare coverage is privatized, and we’ve got the most expensive healthcare in the world with the 44th-best health outcomes,” he said. “It’s hard to justify the status quo on any rational basis.

“So if they want to repair and protect their reputation with customers and avoid this kind of backlash in the future, they have to understand where the customer is coming from and then find ways to speak to those problems and offer up a set of policies or practices they’re going to engage in—changes they’re going to make—to make this easier and better for customers.”

Health industry executives who try to defend the status quo of the U.S. healthcare system come off as tone-deaf at best, and uncaring or willfully dismissive of people’s suffering at worst.

“One of the mistakes that a lot of CEOs make is they try to defend the status quo, instead of saying, ‘You’re right; we’re not doing what we should be doing,’ and then, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do to make it to make it better,’” Pollock said. “There’s a whole other set of issues related to whether or not these things get implemented, but at least symbolically acknowledging their pain, their anger, taking some responsibility for it, and then saying, ‘We’re going to make changes that will address these problems and make things better going forward’ counts for something.

“But if they come out and talk about profitability, that their responsibility is to shareholders, or that this isn’t really a problem, or try to downplay the challenges that people have with high costs, denials of coverage, and administrative burdens, there’s a disconnect from patients’ experiences,” he said. “This is the issue you run into when leaders and customers are coming at a problem from opposite sides or completely different perspectives.”

Why Many Leaders Ignore Criticism

By Daniel Butcher

In the wake of the U.S. public’s reaction to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of suspect Luigi Mangione, some CEOs in the health insurance industry downplayed the tragedy, rather than thinking about the root cause of people’s anger directed toward them.

Keeping blinders on is a red flag for narcissism, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He and Arijit Chatterjee of ESSEC Business School researched narcissistic CEOs and found that the more narcissistic the executives are, the more likely they are to ignore critical messages, and surround themselves with yes-men.

“Many CEOs, especially narcissistic ones, surround themselves with people who say, ‘No, don’t listen to the critics. You’re great. You’ve done nothing wrong. Everything’s wonderful,’ as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a real problem that we need to fundamentally think through and deal with,” Pollock said. “So there’s nobody to rein in CEOs when they’re making bad decisions or alert them to a blind spot that they have.

“We all have good ideas and bad ideas, but leaders need people to tell them when they have a bad idea and to stop them from from acting on it,” he said. “When you don’t have those people in place telling the CEO to tap the brakes, the bad ideas just spread, and a narcissistic CEO doesn’t want to hear the negative stuff, whereas a less narcissistic CEO who really wants todo the best job possible will actually cultivate that and make sure they have people around them who will tell them the truth, even if it’s something that they don’t really want to hear, but that they need to hear.

“But a narcissistic CEO will fire truthsayers; they’ll get rid of people who they perceive as disloyal for telling them negative stuff or telling them that they’re wrong.”