Speaking on the Diversity and Inclusivity Finance Forum (DIFF) podcast, he said he found that “at the real upper echelons of these businesses, they are paying lip service to this. They’re ticking the right boxes, they’re saying the right things, but I’m not sure they’re actually really bought in at the exec management level to deliver the change that the people within the organisation actually want.”
He said the biggest challenge was how to push diversity and inclusion “upwards into organisations” and genuinely get commitment at the highest levels.
When asked if the solution is to speak with people from different backgrounds to understand where they are coming from, Sinclair said this was “essential”.
He said earlier in his career, he spent a lot of time with a Barbadian colleague, and it was the first time he was around someone who experienced “overt and passive racism all of his life”.
Sinclair said that the discussions he had with his colleague were “interesting” because whilst he saw him as a fully-rounded individual, others in the past had viewed Sinclair’s colleague solely through the lens of his colour.
He added: “The level of racism he had to encounter and the work he had to do, and the amount of sh*t he had to swallow to get to where he got to was really interesting in my perspective.”
Sinclair said by getting a broader understanding of different people’s views and experiences, the more people would begin to integrate and “deliver genuine equity”.
He said people had to be prepared to step out of their comfort zone to get that level of learning and understanding.
He said it helped to have people in your life who will “tell you the hard truth about how… other people perceive you. And you have to be prepared to take that on board and think about it”.
Self-redemption
Sinclair said the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements happened around the same time and conversations around the issued faced by women and people of colour had led to a “recognition that you should not walk past the things that you see that are wrong”.
He said it needed to be challenged and dealt with “otherwise, the people who are encountering it are suffering”.
He also said he had spent part of the last 12 months apologising to two people in the sector for past behaviour that may have been offensive.
Sinclair said he was brought up during a time when there were different attitudes towards what was acceptable and at times, he was possibly more touchy feely with people than they might have wanted.
Sinclair said: “Both of them [the people he said sorry to] have looked at me strangely and asked, ‘what are you apologising for?'”
He was told if his behaviour had been that bad, they would have let him know at the time. However, Sinclair said: “That doesn’t excuse it.”
He added: “I’ve looked at it now and think I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m not going to do it now. But the interesting part of that is recognition.”
Sinclair said he had not always “been as appropriate as I should have been” and because he cared about the people involved, he wanted to say sorry for possibly causing offence.
A louder voice
Sinclair said he was more politically active now that he was older and not constrained by organisational expectations.
He said: “I used to be very angry at everything and I’m no longer angry in the same way.”
He also noted that people went through stages in life where they might be politically motivated, but when they started a family, they had to “conform in a way to the organisational structures in which they operated in order to be promoted and earn money.”
He said: “As I’m older now and I’m no longer corralled by the economic, or social, or family controls, I’m much more emotionally active and pushing boundaries that I probably did when I was younger but haven’t done for 25 or 30 years when I had to build a career.”
Listen to the full episode [37:17] hosted by Bharat Sagar, ambassador-at-large of AE3 Media, featuring Robert Sinclair, chief executive of the Association for Mortgage Intermediaries.
