"Discrimination, per se, is not illegal, and is a mainstay of successful management. What forms of discrimination both allow strengthening of a company and treating employees fairly and ethically?"
When a friend posed that question, I was shocked. For me, as for many others, "discrimination" has become a dirty word. Until I substituted a synonym, "differentiation," I was stuck on the use of discrimination to indicate bias.

Moving beyond the shock factor, my friend raises a serious question about personnel management. I asked my e-mail network to assist me in answering the question. I incorporated their guidance both in the quotes below and in my reasoning.

Depending on legal jurisdiction, many forms of discrimination, including ethnicity, gender, age, religion and physical ability, are illegal. However, discrimination for inadequate technical competence, poor judgment, laziness, lack of enthusiasm, inappropriate or negative attitude and lack of creativity, etc. is acceptable. In some situations, it may not be obvious whether illegal or legal discrimination played the dominant role in the decision.

One person counseled, "Discrimination often lies in the eyes of the recipient - a manager can have perfectly good reasons for a particular decision that will not be seen the same way by someone on the look out for discrimination - either the employee or the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission)."

Personnel issues are among the most difficult tasks for managers. As human beings, we may not be aware of all of our biases. Preconceptions about different groups may subconsciously cloud our decisions.

On the flip side, individuals have an equally difficult challenge in objectively rating themselves against the competition. It is much easier to blame factors beyond our control than to accept responsibility for our deficiencies.

Better interaction between supervisors and employees can help on both sides. When an employee has more contact with management, that person has a better chance of being evaluated as an individual rather than as a stereotype. If you are at risk of being stereotyped, you need to be more proactive than others in getting to know the boss.

Don't fall into the trap of interpreting every setback as discrimination. Many people sympathize with this person's statement, "I get pretty irritated at people who yell, 'Discrimination!' at every turn. I've suffered discrimination, but I absolutely know I've benefited from it at other times."

One of the difficult aspects of supervision is honestly coaching people. As an employee, we can strive to listen with an open mind to discussion of our weaknesses so as to make it easier for our supervisor to coach us. Even then, we may not get the feedback we need. Unfortunately, as one person observed, "We have a plethora of weak supervisors who don't have the courage to counsel an employee truthfully and to work with that employee on improvement . . . weak supervision robs the employee of their chance to make the effort to regain the momentum they may have lost."

Top management should be vigilant to ensure that policies regarding fair employment practices are uniformly implemented. In large organizations, statistics should be used to monitor compliance. If N members of X group have been hired, where N is a reasonably large number, and none have succeeded, don't fall into the trap of blaming externalities for the failure of the group. Odds are that your organization has a problem and something in the system is biased.

All of us need to be upgrading our skills and competencies constantly. If we are at our personal best, we increase our ability to find greener pastures. Personal excellence is also critical if we are striving to improve things for our group as a whole. It is much easier to make our case if we clearly excel.

Eve Sprunt, evesprunt@aol.com, is an oil industry executive. Responses in quotes come from her broad network of contacts in the industry who respond to her e-mail surveys.

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