You know your workplace respect or diversity training has gone seriously, horrifically awry when you read about it in the national news and friends on Facebook are referring to articles about it with comments like, "OMG! I thought that was an article from "The Onion." Yes, I am talking about Austin and its recent training seminar, "The Changing Dynamics in Governance: Women Leading in Local Government." If you think that sounds like a well-known progressive city using diversity training to help its government avoid embarrassment, you are wrong. Horribly wrong.
Recent elections resulted in a female majority on the Austin city council, and the Austin city manager's office thought diversity training would be a good idea. So far so good. Diversity training can often help employees understand that workplaces are rarely homogenous in 2015 and that respect for everyone is essential. This training is important from a touchy-feely, improving teamwork perspective, but it also helps avoid liability exposure. Employers who want their employees to understand acceptable—and unacceptable—workplace behavior must provide effective education about the company's anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies. This knowledge not only fosters better employee relations, but training that directs employees to the company policy and instructs them who to contact within the organization allows employers to nip problems in the bud. The training can also support an affirmative defense if an employee has been made aware of the company's policies but fails to avail himself/herself of the outlined procedures. As an employment lawyer, I tell clients that this may be the most important hour or two you spend with your employees each year. After the Austin debacle, though, I will add the caveat that that WHO you choose to conduct the training may be at least as important.
I don't know how the Austin city manager's office found its speaker Jonathan Allen, but I don't know that Austin could have picked a worse trainer. First, national news organizations report that Mr. Allen was recently FIRED from his position as a city manager in Florida. That minor detail should probably have set off an alarm bell. Mr. Allen does not appear to be a lawyer; nor does he play one on TV, but if he did, it would be on SNL or Comedy Central. Because, yes, he proceeded to regale the attendees at a workplace respect seminar with almost every negative female stereotype known to man. Among the insights he offered were the following gems: urging patience because women don't bother to read the research they're given; advising that a lot of women are activists with no experience in government; saying that women often don't want to hear about financial arguments and are more concerned with issues surrounding community impacts. He added that there is a "risk" of more women in government as Hillary Clinton runs from president, and (my personal favorite!) described the patience needed to deal with women asking multiple questions by using an analogy of how he patiently answered his 11-year-old daughter's repeated questions on the same subject. The City of Austin removed the video of the "Women in Leadership" program from its website, and replaced it with the City Manager's memo apologizing for the training.
Because a good SNL skit usually has a couple of cast members, Mr. Allen brought a professor from an online business school (I swear, I am not making this up) by the name of Miya Burt-Stewart. Dr. Burt-Stewart continued in SNL skit mode, by quoting the learned treatise, "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus." She further perpetuated the stereotypes of men acting on facts, women acting on emotions and cautioned that women who take over a formerly male-dominated environment should avoid shutting men out because women were shut out for so long. Seriously. They did that. Unfortunately, the city manager who scheduled the training did not attend the session (bad move!), so he was unable to do any sort of damage control before things hit the proverbial fan.
To say that this little two-hour presentation went over like a lead balloon doesn't begin to describe the situation. After the women city council members held a press conference to protest the training given to city workers to help them deal with the female council members, the details of the training went viral, and not in a good way. As one might imagine, the female council members were not happy (I dare not even speculate how Mr. Allen might describe these "emotional," angry women). Reporters picked up on the story and questioned whether a training session that talked about the "risk" of more women running for elected office was really the right fit for a city government in 2015. Austin was widely mocked across the nation.
The fact that the city manager had "good intentions" (his way of describing it when questioned by the media) in scheduling the training matters not. Reporters and citizens of Austin are questioning whether he should keep his job. Something to think about when you schedule your company's next workplace respect training.
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