Should black employees be managed differently?

There's a new book available in the United States titled The Soulful Parent.

An article by Meggan Cottrel of ChicagoNow.com reviewing the book that asked 'Should black children be parented differently?' elicited an immediate response of 'no' from me, as it would from most parents.

That is, until I read the article, which led me to wonder: Does the management of a predominantly African workforce in the diaspora require different skills from the ones espoused in European and North American countries?

An excerpt from the article which quotes the author, Kerby Alvy, asks why black parents need someone to tell them how to parent effectively. The answer, Alvy said, is the continued racism and difficulty that black children still face in the society.

"If white folks have programmes that help them put their kids at an advantage in the society, by rearing in positive ways, then, dammit, black folks deserve the same opportunities," said Alvy.

Alvy said he and his colleagues discovered that many parenting techniques that blacks tend to use are holdovers from slavery, a time where very specific practices were used to keep children safe.

Corporal punishment

He said these notions don't come from African ideas about child rearing where children are viewed as an extension of the parent, but out of situations where parents are raising children under duress.

Corporal punishment is one example.

"This value (children as extensions) was almost impossible to maintain when hundreds of thousands of Africans were forced into slavery," Alvy writes.

"Once they were sold to slave masters, they continued to be beaten if they did not obey their masters." And parents used this same kind of punishment to keep their children from getting beaten.

"Thus, the origins of traditional black discipline, which emphasises whipping and punishment and which gets expressed in the idea that, 'I must protect my child from white harm, even if it means I must beat the black off of him'," he writes.

When parents realise the origins of their behaviour, many of them are shocked and convinced never to use corporal punishment again and to instead try alternative means of discipline.

Alvy said his black colleagues have pointed out to him a similar tendency when it comes to praise.

"Sometimes when a slave master or overseer was saying a child was coming along, the parent would quickly point out bad qualities, playing down the child's goodness because they didn't want their child to be sold," Alvy said.

"That sort of thing can get perpetuated - we don't want to let the kids know that they're doing well."

The article goes on to say that what's needed is an emphasis on the beauty and power of their own heritage, and guarding against derogatory comments.

focus on our past

Sound familiar? In the Jamaican workplace, we don't reward as often as we punish. US Peace Corps volunteers to our island tell me that they had no idea they were making a difference until their very last day during their goodbye parties.

At another level, Jamaican funerals are grand, moving affairs - one of the few occasions where good things are said about people in an unreserved way, albeit at a time when they'll never hear them.

In response to my prior columns, some have suggested I focus too much on our past, and that we should be able to put it behind us. I disagree, simply because no one can explain to me how we should do so effectively.

Here's a clue. In my firm's expatriate transition business, our clients tell us that the Jamaican workplace is confounding. So many things are different that it's impossible to focus on one or two things at a time - instead, an expat manager must find a way to see all of it at once without the lens of any other culture to interfere.

A new lens is necessary for us if we are to understand our lack of productivity as a nation, as companies and as individuals.

Kerby Alvy is doing great things in the area of training parents and we, in turn, must work to understand the strengths and weaknesses of our inheritance in the workplace, and not ignore or dishonour it by blindly accepting foreign interpretations.

Francis Wade is president of Framework Consulting and host of CaribHRForum. Send feedback to francis@fwconsulting.com