Photograph of Ujima Donalson

A Message from Ujima Donalson, POD Director

It’s become increasingly clear to me that race and equity are complex issues that many people have trepidation about tackling, and I think leaders feel that doubly. You may be grappling with your own comfort level and subject knowledge while also being tasked with supporting your staff equitably, making fair and sound decisions around hiring and performance management, and confronting any bias or discrimination you see in the workplace.

Through the Race & Equity Initiative, I’ve engaged on a completely different level with both new and known people across campus over the past year. I’ve had spontaneous conversations sparked by articles and lectures related to the Initiative, participated as a table facilitator at multiple roundtable discussions offered for students, and worked with colleagues from across the University on a workshop/training team for the Initiative. Along with feeling both personally and professionally enriched, I’ve gotten a much more robust perspective on what’s happening across the University. We all know how easy it is to feel siloed at such a vast institution, and it’s been refreshing to be exposed to our students and to academic areas I hadn’t been in contact with before.


My advice for leaders is to start by building a common vocabulary. Many times we are silent because we don’t have the language to engage. Once you acquire language, you can move to awareness and to assessing where you are. As many people have said before, the first step to overcoming a problem is admitting you have one. That thinking can be applied here in that a first step is raising your self-awareness, figuring out what you don’t know, and becoming more cognizant of how your thinking may be biased. This is all part of becoming more culturally competent.

In this issue of The Leading Edge, we highlight many of the tools, resources, and opportunities available to help each of us move along the cultural competence continuum, including those provided through the Race & Equity Initiative, through POD, and elsewhere. I also highly recommend taking the Race Implicit Association Test (see Links for Leaders in this issue) as a way to kick-start your self-awareness.

No doubt, there’s a reason people may feel intimidated or apprehensive—this topic can be difficult because it is deeply personal and has many tentacles. One way of thinking about your own and others’ cultural competence is a model we sometimes use in the training world; it’s referred to as the four stages of learning or, alternatively, the hierarchy of competence. The lowest level is unconscious incompetence, which is where we don’t even know what we don’t know. Next is conscious incompetence, which marks a heightened level of awareness; at this stage, we understand more about what we don’t know even if our knowledge, skills, or abilities haven’t completely caught up to our newfound awareness. From there, we move to conscious competence, which is when our awareness and ability have aligned but it still takes great effort or concentration to do things “right.” The highest level is unconsciousness competence; at this stage, we’ve become fluent in new skills or behaviors.

What I love about this model is its relatability. We can all think of times when we started a new hobby or developed a new skill. Maybe you remember learning to play the piano and practicing a piece over and over again. At first, you had to focus on your fingers and the sheet music with such concentration, and still made mistakes. Then your playing became smoother, more natural, and you made fewer mistakes; finally, your fingers were flying and you didn’t even have to think about what you were doing. Or maybe you remember trying a new approach for communicating with a child, spouse, or employee. At first, you had to remind yourself of the right steps, the right words, or the right tone, and you probably stumbled more than once. But if you kept with it, it probably came to feel like second nature to you.

It’s important to remember that we all have our own learning curves. We need to push forward together. We must also be patient with ourselves and others as we learn how to better understand ourselves and our motivations and relate to each other in new ways.

Spring 2016 | Return to Issue Home