How Do You Make Supplier Diversity Antiracist? Eliminate Racist Practice and Policy
Supplier Diversity is a key pathway to economic equity for diverse-owned businesses. Supplier Diversity is enabled by corporations and industry organizations dedicated to economic equity and justice. But Supplier Diversity is not immune to embedded ideas, practice and policy that can be systemically racist. In this post I breakdown what Antiracist Supplier Diversity practice and policy can look like, and how to advance them in corporate Supplier Diversity.
Corporate America continues to grapple with the historic and systemic conditions that have marginalized underrepresented groups, and the resulting economic inequity that follows. During my years as a corporate leader working to make Google’s business operations more equitable, and now as a Black entrepreneur working in and pursuing corporate business, my career has been intimately connected to Supplier Diversity, and the question of how to grow access to vast and profitable corporate supply chains.
Supplier Diversity is the process by which a corporation can ensure that its procurement practices do not discriminate against supplier’s with diverse ownership. The Supplier Diversity movement emerged from a few directions, but the formal practice emerged chiefly from the Civil Rights Era victory of the establishment of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) in the United States. Supplier Diversity establishes mechanisms for businesses owned by individuals from specific, traditionally marginalized groups, to be certified to gain access to government and corporate supply chains through various mechanisms. This ownership designation becomes a useful if not perfect proxy to creating equitable economic impact. The growth of this practice from within Federal procurement expanding across corporate America, to many countries globally and across many different kinds of marginalizations. At stake is the inclusion of people from historically marginalized communities into the vast Billions involved in corporate procurement.
The problem is that, over time, the policies and practices of Supplier Diversity have too often reinforced structural biases in corporate America. That is to say, too often, Supplier Diversity is racist.
One telltale sign of such biased practice is when companies participating in Supplier Diversity too often confuse the potential of diverse-owned suppliers with their status as diverse-owned suppliers. In practicing for 13 years in Supplier Diversity, the most consistent objection I receive from corporate buyers, at my old shop Google and across industry, is about the size/capabilities of theoretical diverse-owned suppliers. The common reply is “I’d love to work with diverse suppliers, but the suppliers I work with are larger, higher-capacity vendors.” There is a biased assumption embedded within this common reply. When offered the chance to work with more diverse suppliers, if you assume anything about their size and capacity based on the fact that they may be owned by a member of a historically marginalized group by race, ethnicity, gender or other, you have made a biased – or racist – assumption.
The way to ensure avoiding racist inaction or action in any industry program is to put in place practice and policy that are antiracist. Policies that start from the understanding that any given company owned and operated by, for instance, a white man, will be no better or worse than a company owned by, for instance, a black woman, on the basis of those racial and gender categories of its owner. Quoting scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist on the definition of Antiracist:
“Antiracist: One who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none needs developing, and is supporting policy that reduces racial inequity.”
An antiracist approach to the potential for engaging more diverse-owned suppliers might consist of the following statements:
“I would like to work with more diverse-owned suppliers.
I recognize that the representation of diverse suppliers in my supplier base is less than that in the general market.
I have specific business requirements for any supplier who works with my company,
and/or a known bar of performance from my existing supplier(s).
Let’s go find diverse-owned suppliers with the potential to meet or exceed those requirements, or the potential to meet or exceed the performance of my current supplier(s).”
This company’s approach would be antiracist because it does not assume, before knowing capabilities, that any given diverse-owned supplier might be unable to perform capably. It does not assume that the company’s supplier composition should differ from that available in the market. It does not assume that any given diverse supplier would be unable to meet or exceed the company’s criteria for performance, or that of its current suppliers. It assumes that capable suppliers – who happen to be diverse-owned – are available to be found in the market.
Unfortunately racist Supplier Diversity policy has been coded into our field-wide practice of Supplier Diversity. Take for instance the term “Supplier Development,” which is a generally acceptable term for the practice of giving diverse-owned suppliers the training, knowledge, tools and connections to become competitive for business with corporations. Recall Kendi’s test for antiracism (“racial groups are equals and none needs developing”). The framing around Supplier “Development” is what Kendi would define as an Assimilationist Racist idea. To quote Kendi on the definition of Assimilationist:
“Assimilationist: One who is expressing the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioral enrichment programs to develop that racial group.”
Supplier Development, in the context of a potential corporate contract, assumes that a diverse supplier must be “developed” or improved in some way to be ready for that business. Implicit in this is the notion that non-diverse-owned suppliers do not need this development to be ready. Also implicit is the notion that corporations do not need to be “developed” to approach their supplier engagement without bias. Both are false.
Here are some elements of successful Antiracist Supplier Diversity practice:
Evaluate any supplier based on their capabilities. Evaluate the quality of a potential supplier based on their business capabilities. Make no assumption about any individual supplier’s quality, capability, size or other performance metric based on the supplier’s diverse or non-diverse ownership status.
Don’t hold any one supplier as a representative of their ownership category. Distinguish any individual diverse-owned supplier from their category, ensuring that no one supplier comes to represent for you that supplier’s ownership category as a whole. (E.g., “that woman-owned supplier performed poorly, and therefore I cannot engage with women-owned suppliers.)
Take action to pursue diverse suppliers. If your supplier base is not already sufficiently diverse (I very rarely if ever observe one that is!) it will take concrete, proactive action to pursue the right diverse suppliers.
And, some elements of successful Antiracist Supplier Diversity Policy:
Pursue Supplier Partnerships, not Supplier Development. This recognizes that your company will need to better develop its capacity to find and engage diverse-owned suppliers, while directly educating potential suppliers about your company’s criteria for hiring suppliers.
Measure Outcomes across your supplier base, not by individual suppliers. Set a goal to grow the proportion of your supplier base that is diverse-owned and evaluate your Supplier Diversity initiative against that growth. Do not evaluate your Supplier Diversity initiative based on the performance of individual suppliers.
Pursue specific, relevant suppliers. Pursue suppliers who are relevant to your business needs, doing your homework and using your network and established networks of diverse suppliers to. Do not pursue a general pool of diverse-owned suppliers looking for success in finding potential suppliers. This needle in a haystack approach is as unlikely to succeed to diverse-owned businesses as it would for non-diverse-owned businesses.
Begin your Supplier Diversity practice utilizing these practices and policies as a guide. If you have a Supplier Diversity practice, see if these hold up in how you do business today. If you are violating any of these principles, it’s okay to acknowledge this with your team and design changes that will better represent your company’s antiracist approach to Supplier Diversity. Creating economic equity or equity of any kind can only start when we understand structures that reinforce bias, and act to change them. Supplier Diversity is a venue with ample opportunity for exactly this kind of progress.
– Chris Genteel
Glidelane helps companies build Supplier Diversity and other DEI initiatives with antiracist practice, policy and principles. If you manage are or thinking about building a Supplier Diversity initiative contact Glidelane to see how we can help.