Posts Tagged ‘ethnicity’

Five Myths That Doom Diversity Efforts

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

Greater diversity does not easily translate to greater performance. It takes work to make that happen. Yet many leaders are content in the illusion that symbolic activities and underfunded training classes will turn their increasingly diverse organizations into world-class performers. Understanding why diversity is so often mismanaged requires debunking five strongly held myths about diversity:

Myth 1: Having diversity will increase performance and profits

Why it’s a myth: Having greater diversity in your team and in your organization only helps if you understand what to do with it.  Bringing together people of different ethnicities, genders, or sexual orientations and saying “go to work” is a blueprint for failure and several studies bear this out.  The key is being strategic about what kind of diversity you need to get the job done and going after it.

Myth 2: If you increase the number of women and people of color, you have increased your diversity

Why it’s a myth: Of course gender and ethnicity play a role in the way people see things. But the value of diversity doesn’t come from the appearance of a person.  Rather, it comes in taking advantage of diverse perspectives to create business results. You can have a group that very much looks like the rainbow, but thinks pretty much the same.  In that case, you haven’t increased your diversity at all.

Myth 3: Diversity efforts always benefit women and people of color

Why it’s a myth: White males are the generally the dominant group in the U.S. workplace and often believe they have the most to lose—jobs, promotions, status—when it comes to diversity.  But women, people of color, and other people who are different also resist when diversity rhetoric and norms of behavior single them out and put them under a microscope.  If diversity is only about counting heads, neither the organization nor “diverse” employees benefit in the long run.

Myth 4: A diverse workplace is ideally a harmonious and integrated workplace

Why it’s a myth: When diversity is working at its best, people are constantly bumping up against new ideas and perspectives that challenge long-held beliefs about how they see the world.  I don’t know about you, but that activity usually unsettles me.  A workplace in which differences are being leveraged is dynamic, energized, emotional and rarely boring.  If you think that the ultimate vision for true diversity is constant harmony, think again.

Myth #5: Corporate leaders who want to increase race and gender diversity will make it happen 

Why it’s a myth: Leaders constantly juggle the need to meet business goals with the need to meet diversity goals. That causes them frequently to make choices between a focus on either increasing race and gender diversity, or focusing on corporate performance.  Because diversity is not well-linked to perfromance, they have to choose which will take precedent and diversity efforts almost always fall by the wayside.  And an added cost: these leaders—who really want to do the right thing—end up worried that they will be seen as biased because they aren’t making progress with diversity.  The only solution to this is to make diversity efforts and corporate performance one in the same.  Leveraging difference, not managing diversity, can do just that.

Black Russians

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

I met Black Russians today.

No, I don’t mean Russians of African descent. And I’m not using a euphemism for going on a bender of delicious vodka-laced drinks during this exciting trip to Moscow. Rather, I’ve just finished teaching an amazing session with a sharp group of Russian executives who I’ve been helping foster a high-engagement, high-performance culture in their company. They have been struggling with a culture that has pockets of cynical, demoralized people and they really want to do better. But it wasn’t until we dove more deeply into what was happening in the company that I stumbled onto this fundamental insight:

This young, talented group of Russians is having an experience inside the company that is remarkably similar to that of black people in U.S. corporations.

The parallels are fascinating. I’ve learned that the history of this generation of Russians is, in some ways, disheartening. First, the demographic patterns over the past couple of generations mirror the story of African Americans. Just after World War II, there was a major shortage of males in the population: there were 2.2 females for every male in the population.[1] While those numbers have evened out over the years (1.2 females for every male in 2009), the legacy of the devastation of the male population during the 20th century remains—significantly higher health vulnerabilities than women, shorter life expectancy, and higher incidences of substance abuse, especially alcoholism. 2 These are all issues that have been visible and widely discussed in the African American community, too.

Culturally, the Soviet political structure left many challenges in its wake. For example, one participant shared with me that one consequence of Russia’s late entry into a capitalist economy is that Russian professionals receive a pretty consistent message from the multinational business world: your markets are lucrative, but as skilled managers and leaders in those markets you are lacking. No matter how competent they are objectively, there is a sense that many young Russian professionals feel as though they are not perceived to be competent enough to take senior leadership positions locally in global corporations. They don’t yet see many role models in their organizations that would counter that concern. And while they acknowledge that as a group, they do have a lot to learn professionally, they also feel that some are talented, experiences, and very ready. And they are frustrated by not having that talent, experience, and potential recognized. They spoke of wanting to have more authority and responsibility and of simply wanting a fair chance to advance to the highest levels of the company, messages I continue to hear in my work with black professionals in the U.S.

So often, I hear that “diversity” is a U.S. thing that has limited relevance globally. No one denies there is tremendous diversity globally—that’s obvious. But often, executives and students I work with see the way U.S. folks deal with difference as idiosyncratic. We are obsessed with race, they say, and we are too focused on attending to differences without seeing how similar we are.

Ironically, my experience reinforces how similar we truly are all over the world. We struggle with similar inequities borne of the unique circumstances of our societies and our histories. Whether it is slavery in the U.S., or the government political system in Russia and the former Soviet Union, or the ethnic divides in Vietnam (I learned that some people from certain provinces in Vietnam tend to receive preferential treatment within the labor force), every nation and every society has a story of difference, power, and inequity. Leaders and managers do a disservice to all of their stakeholders when they deny these realities in their organizations.

Leaders and their organizations do better when we engage these issues and these differences with openness and an attitude of exploration and learning. Today, my Russian colleagues will initiate a conversation about their experience as Russian professionals with their ex-pat leaders. It’s a great start.

[1] Age structure of the Russian population as of January 1, 2009 Rosstat Retrieved on 2009-10-08.
[2] Wikipedia entry “Demographics of Russia”