Underperformane depends on plethora of issues

Q I am a manager of managers. One is very vocal about her commitment to diversity, and her team is noticeably more diverse than others. However, nearly all our low performers — as documented by both quantitative performance metrics, as well as 360 peer feedback — are on her team. She's taken little action to address the challenges.

I am concerned that she is potentially lowering her standards in hiring, and ignoring her team's quality of work, in order to maintain her commitment to diversity. The performance issues are becoming very visible to the rest of the organization. How do I address this situation?

— Anonymous

A Before you address this situation, you need to look inward. Why isn't every manager in your organization committed to diversity? Why do you assume the demographic composition of this manager's team is correlated to its performance metrics? The way you've framed this question reflects an inherent, pernicious and unfortunately prevalent bias — that embracing and encouraging diversity means compromising on excellence. This is provably false. People from underrepresented groups are as capable as anyone else. They are as flawed as anyone else.

If your manager isn't taking action to address the quality issues of her team, she is a poor manager, and you need to address her inadequacies. If she too harbors biases and assumes that she cannot offer her team members critical feedback for fear of appearing bigoted, she needs to be disabused of this notion. If the employees are unable to improve, they are poor performers, but that poor performance has nothing to do with their identities.