During the past week, three diversity-related articles caught my attention.

In the first, published on Townhall.com on Jun 27, 2016, Paul Greenberg listed ideas he finds most repellent: eugenics; food as fuel; Obamacare; educanto, whatever that is; and diversity. Regarding diversity, he wrote:

“The whole industry, racket and fraud. Complete with racial, sexual and class quotas. … At best, all these supernumeraries aren’t needed, and at worst they represent a clear and present danger to education, the real thing and not the inflated fraud that may go under its name.”

“Surprise, surprise,” I thought, inwardly yawning, “another conservative trashing diversity.”

In a July 1 article in the Huffington Post, Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Rabson argued that the “increased diversity promotes effectiveness” selling point might be misleading.

“Could it be,” they asked, “that the superior performance of demographically diverse senior managements is not cause but effect, a manifestation of an organization wired for an expansive understanding of its operating environment and the world at large?”

Finally, in a Harvard Business Review article, Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev talked about what makes diversity programs fail and succeed. Unsuccessful strategies include hiring tests, grievance procedures, annual reviews, and mandatory training programs.

Yes, mandatory training programs, the starting point of most diversity initiatives.

According to Dobbin and Kalev’s five-year analysis, organizations using this strategy saw a nine percent loss of black women and a five percent loss of Asian men and women.

I thought back to my first diversity training experience while working for a large federal government agency. An African American congresswoman encouraged the African Americans in the room to become more powerful while making snide comments about us white people there. A multiracial gospel choir closed the session with a rendition of “We Are The World.” And relations between blacks and whites within our division continued to sour.

So I wasn’t especially surprised that mandatory diversity training was ineffective. After all, no one likes being told what to do, especially from someone they don’t know. Indeed, the main complaint that conservatives have about diversity programs boils down to:

“Don’t tell us what to do, hypocrites!”

To which many of us from the diversity industry would respond with:

“Don’t tell us what to do, hypocrites!”

So, what does work? According to Dobbin and Kalev, successful strategies include encouraging managers to take part in college recruitment programs targeted to people from underrepresented groups, mentor “minority” employees, and generally engage with people from different cultures.

Several years after my first taste of “learning through browbeating,” I took part in a six-day seminar where a diverse group of people learned more effective diversity training strategies through, among other things, leading a workshop to support at-risk high school students to function better as a team. Through this experience, I learned more about my biases and how to manage diversity-related conflicts more effectively. And I learned about the futility of preaching at people.

Mandatory diversity training runs the risk of hardening hearts. But finding ways to promote cross-cultural relationships in a supportive environment encourages building of both skills and partnerships. Especially if everyone has committed to a common goal. Especially if the organization’s culture promotes healthy processes by which differing strengths and perspectives can come together to address common challenges. And especially if independent thinking is encouraged.

To all my US readers, Happy Fourth!