Meeting the Adaptive Challenge of Diversity

⚀ Surface beliefs about why workplace diversity would be a “good thing” for the organization.

This is the world of “logic models” that reveal how the organization believes things should be. Change agents can surface these normative belief statements by asking people to complete a sentence like: “I believe that …”.

The responses are always telling.

For example, “I believe that our organization’s demographics ought to …”:

• “… reflect the demographics found in nature (i.e., an equal distribution of men and women).”
• “… reflect the demographics of our country.”
• “… reflect the demographics of our customers.”
• “… minimize internal blind spots.”
• “… right the wrongs (racism, sexism, etc.) of the past.”
• “… be determined by talent and merit so that we can move beyond issues of discrimination.”
• “… contribute to enhancing our performance and make us a better place to work.”

These assumptions need to be discussed since they often lie hidden behind diversity programs — quietly, but directly, shaping how they are designed, developed and implemented.

⚁ Think deeply about what it would mean for yours to be a more diverse organization.

Change agents need to develop a clearer idea of how workplace diversity might manifest itself in their organizations in the future. How would you know you have become a diverse company?

One way to start is to ask yourself the following question:

“It’s five years from now and your company has been recognized for how it has (positively) improved workplace diversity. What does the organization look, and feel, like compared with where it started? What does this mean to you, personally?”

If you were to ask three other people in your organization the same question what do think you would see when you compare responses? Chances are that there will be significant differences, not to mention some seemingly incompatible elements, in the different visions. That’s good! This is where change agents need to start — with a stance of empathy and and desire to understand the perspectives of others.

⚂ Be honest about the benefits sought from increased workplace diversity.

There are many reasons why an organization would want to become more diverse. Some reasons are more mundane while others more high minded.

Workplace diversity efforts may be linked to the avoidance, enhancement or pursuit of:

Risk: The organization needs to minimize exposure to risk and comply with legislation or other mandatory requirements. Avoiding court dates, legal fees, settlements and or fines drives the need to carefully and systematically manage diversity across the organization.

Reputation: The organization is in the spotlight and has made public commitments to workplace diversity (e.g., in the press, at shareholder meetings, etc.). It is important to their brand that they are seen as diverse.

Economic Value: The organization recognizes that in order to better engage and expand their customer base or to tap into different talent pools, diversity is an instrumental means of driving business performance. The organization is aware of the growing body of research on what makes groups more creative and want to develop a culture whereby teams ask themselves: “What perspective are we missing here? Where are our blind spots? How can we get a different view on this topic?” Workplace diversity means finding “the difference that makes a difference” to organizational performance.

Moral Value: For these organizations, diversity in the workplace is a moral good in itself. Forget about business results. Never mind the legislation. It’s the right thing to do in order to be the organization we want to be.

Each will lead to slightly, and in some cases radically, different implementation options. Companies looking to avoid lawsuits tend to focus on reducing their liability through diversity awareness programs and quota-filling. Organizations who are trying to become more innovative will tend to have a broad scope for the diversity they want to access, moving beyond race and gender to age, sexual orientation, cultural background and subject-matter expertise, among others.

⚃ Look in the mirror and acknowledge how diverse your organization really is

We’ll admit it. We hate being weighed. We hate being timed. We hate being evaluated.

But these things are necessary if one is to lose weight, run faster or demonstrate a level of proficiency in a task or skill.

In the context of the vision and underlying belief system driving your change efforts, the organization needs to understand and measure the current level of diversity and understand how it is shifting (or not) over time.

The data may surprise you or it may merely confirm your suspicions. When we first looked at the demographic data for a selection of high-profile tech companies [5] it reinforced what we expected to see (“Very white and very male”) but we were intrigued by the discrepancies between races and genders. We found it difficult to capture in real time all the questions that began to emerge from even a cursory inspection of the data.

Nobody emerges unchanged from engaging demographic data in this way.

⚄ Enroll the wider organization in defining what it could be like if it leveraged diversity differently.

Responding to an adaptive challenge such as workplace diversity requires deep and wide-spread behavioural, cultural, process and system change. Change agents should engage people in co-creating the journey. There are many ways of doing this, such as:

• Large-group, carefully-facilitated workshops to explore stakeholder perceptions of the status quo regarding diversity and to articulate possible, potential futures worth pursuing. The process of co-creating a future-state organization goes a long way to generating ownership and responsibility for workplace diversity.
• Involving a wider set of people in gathering and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data on organizational diversity. This helps in accessing, enrolling and leveraging a larger number of both hearts and minds in developing better responses to the challenge.
• Identifying patterns, practices and other examples of where the organization is already successfully responding to the diversity challenge. “Better practices” are often already in operation, unconsciously or otherwise out of sight, especially in large organizations.

The goal, remember, is involvement. Only when this adaptive challenge is internalized by a critical mass of stakeholders with a common understanding of why diversity is important will the organization begin to find better responses.

⚄⚀ Discover what causes your organization’s level of diversity to change over time.

Organizations reproduce themselves each day. There is broad consistency as to which individuals interact with each other during meetings, breaks and for informal conversations. Teams are convened and, over time, bonds are created that people will look to leverage in the future.

Take a tech start-up, for example. Moving quickly, to design, build, test and iterate products, is the imperative. Figuring out how to rapidly scale the organization is top of mind for leaders at the company. In order to do this, one tactic is to give key personnel the latitude to go out and hire the top 3–4 people in their network (“few questions asked”) and bring them onboard. This makes a lot of sense. If the head of product development was part of a high-functioning team at her previous employer, it is likely that performance can be replicated if they reconstitute themselves in the new firm. However, there is a corollary to this practice. Not only are the team’s working relationships, behavioural norms and history of performance replicated in the new company, so is the level of diversity. If I am a white male with a degree from Stanford and my network is largely comprised of white males from similar universities, it should be no surprise that when I build a team that draws on that network it might be considered less than diverse.

Hiring practices present just one example of a driver of the degree of diversity. Others include: Promotion Processes, Recruitment Pools, People Development Programs and Staffing Methods.

It is important to identify these drivers, understand how they operate and determine which ones make the biggest contribution to a more diverse organization.

⚄⚁ Understand where to pitch the diversity efforts.

Where will you make a difference to workplace diversity?

For a large, multi-national enterprise will it be the company as a whole? Will it be a geographical operating unit? The business unit? Function? Department? Team? Will the impact be experienced at the level of the individual? How?

All of these are valid areas of focus. Each will present a different snapshot of diversity when you analyze the demographic data. Each presents a different set of imperatives and constraints (e.g., legal frameworks, jurisdiction, standards, external stakeholders, cultural norms, value delivery, etc.). The time scales for change are certainly different. It will take less time to generate improved levels of diversity in a department than in a global enterprise. Furthermore, each will require a unique implementation path involving different stakeholders. Change agents need to scope this out carefully.

⚄⚂ Consider the approaches available that can shift the level of diversity.

Depending on where you want to get to with respect to workplace diversity, and why, there will be different approaches you can take, including:

► Managing the Numbers

Typically, this is the world of quotas and “managed” demographics in organizations. These efforts have their place, but are not without controversy. More generously, however, focusing on things like diversity scorecards remains a valid means of maintaining a level of honesty about whether or not there is a biased distribution of personnel in the organization and whether demographics are changing.

► Increasing Awareness

Training programs, videos and regular communication events designed to raise people’s consciousness around racism, sexism and prejudice, and create a more welcoming environment to the underrepresented, are common interventions when it comes to diversity. For the less dynamic of awareness programs, one can make a safe bet that they are driven by a desire to minimize exposure to legal and regulatory risk (“Just make sure your team watches the video and let HR know who has completed the quiz at the end”). More engaging interventions will be focused on exploring cognitive bias, building skills around holding difficult conversations and coaching leaders on how to derive value from unique differences among team members.

► Nurturing the Feedstock

We had a client who once described this approach as a “grow your own” operation. Programs carefully designed to develop talent and provide genuine opportunities for a target demographic have a long-cycle time, but are highly effective especially when they involve working at the secondary and post-secondary education levels.

► Improving the Lifecycle of Talent

Leading on from the feedstock of talent for an organization, there is the value chain that extends from new recruits through hiring, onboarding, training, staffing, performance management, promotion, professional development, retention through to retirement. Each stage of the talent management pipeline presents an opportunity to make a positive impact on diversity.

► Optimizing the Diversity that Exists

In the immediate term, there is always something that can be done to make the most of the demographic cards the organization has been dealt. For example, ad hoc staffing of carefully selected people on projects in order to help teams access a different perspective and/or to diversify informal networks can provide immediate value to the organization both in terms of effectiveness and diversity.

► Leveraging Improved Performance through Diversity

When teams start asking themselves the question: “What perspective are we missing here?” When they reflect on how they might need to “mix things up” to stay fresh. When team members are open to making themselves feel a little “uncomfortable” (say, by adding new people whom they may not know or who have a perspective that they may not understand or agree with). When team leaders are looking to actively leverage diversity and are willing to artfully coach the team through the difficult waters of different life experiences, conflicting viewpoints and interests. When the organization is looking to use diversity (typically in a very broad and inclusively-defined way) to achieve breakthrough performance and create innovative solutions. That is the point when you have developed a solid organizational response to the adaptive challenge that is workplace diversity.

The above points are not meant to be exhaustive. They certainly don’t address the complexity and hard work that is actually defining, developing and delivering comprehensive and fit-for-purpose diversity programs for an enterprise. But these insights should help leaders and change agents frame their thinking in a different way and help them adopt a more human-centred stance towards workplace diversity.

What do you think? How are you framing the challenge?

We’d love to hear from you.