“Asian Americans are a bit misunderstood”

McKinsey’s team of workplace experts is doing the research and writing the reports and getting the receipts on all the meaty complex cultural stuff we cover in this newsletter. I’ve written about the company’s annual women in the workplace analysis and about how diversity initiatives aren’t advancing blue-collar workers. Now, out today, we’ve got a new set of takeaways on Asian Americans in the corporate world.

If you remember anything from today’s newsletter, I hope it’s that lumping “Asian Americans” together in a bucket just does not work for research or for improving outcomes. It’s a grouping we’ve invented that mushes together the experiences of people tied to countless cultures and countries on the most populous continent on the planet.

The report found that depending on ethnicity, education and immigration status, Asian American workers have very different outcomes. But no matter how they identify, most surveyed for this report have the same problems we see for women of color and minority groups in general in the workplace — lower levels of pay and promotion, and a lesser sense of meritocracy, fairness and inclusion than white and male counterparts.

I sat down with one of the report’s authors, Kweilin Ellingrud, a senior partner and director of McKinsey’s Global Institute, and asked her to give me the most important takeaways for employers.

• The first thing that Ellingrud told me is that she hopes companies really internalize how harmful it can be to lump people together under the umbrella of a shared Asian American experience. “Indian is very different than Chinese, is very different than recent Chinese immigrant. You need to understand what the education is, what those experiences are, the variability, the dispersion of outcomes, the underlying issues,” she said. “Asian Americans are a bit misunderstood. People think, ‘Oh, they are pretty well represented.’ Actually there’s a lot of variability in Asian American outcomes.”
• If nothing else, Ellingrud suggested that employers begin by disaggregating their diversity data based on whether someone identifies as South Asian, Southeast Asian or East Asian.

In addition to better and more specific data collection, Ellingrud emphasized the importance of sponsorship. Most women and minority groups report receiving plenty of mentorship, but sponsorship is in fact very different — and far more important.

• “Sponsorship is creating opportunities for someone else. Could look like helping you get a promotion, helping you get staffed on a project, speaking positively about someone or in a review. It usually means I am using my earned political capital to help you in your career. It could mean I'm risking some of my reputation to help you advance,” she said.
• The best employers quantify and track sponsorship very closely, she said. At McKinsey, Ellingrud gets a score for her sponsorship that identifies how many people she sponsors, where they are in their careers, how they feel about her sponsorship and how she compares with other senior company leaders. That’s a practice she encourages every employer to take seriously.
• “Advice is cheap. It’s worth exactly what you pay for it. While it’s helpful to have a broad set of mentors, sponsorship is much more of an intense investment, a mutual commitment. Most leading companies on diversity, equity and inclusion have both defined it and are measuring it,” she said.

Requiring sponsorship and tracking it closely helps to address the fact that without rules in place, people are often more inclined to sponsor those who look and act like them. “And when we see others who are quite different, it’s hard for us to interpret skill and capability accurately. We don’t recognize it because it’s not in our frame of reference,” Ellingrud said.

— Anna Kramer (email | twitter)