The practical application of the topic of Diversity and the incorporation of it into a company’s culture are issues that many organizations struggle with.  Until recently, many managers answered this question with the assertion that discrimination is wrong, both legally and morally.  However, managers are now voicing a different opinion.  A more diverse workforce, managers say, will increase organizational effectiveness.  This concept was explored in a recent article by David Thomas and Robin Ely entitled “Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity”.

Thomas and Ely assert that with a shift in a company’s perspective on diversity, the company can lift employee morale, bringing greater access to new segments of the marketplace and enhancing productivity.  In short, they claim, diversity will be good for business.

They attribute some powerful benefits to a diverse workforce, including:

·         Increased profitability

·         Going beyond financial measures to encompass learning

·         Creativity

·         Flexibility

·         Organizational and individual growth

·         The ability of a company to adjust rapidly and successfully to market changes

To achieve this requires a fundamental change in the attitudes and behaviors of an organization’s leadership.  And that will come only when senior managers abandon an underlying and flawed assumption about diversity and replace it with a broader understanding.

Practical Application of Diversity

Organizations usually take a simplified and easy path in managing diversity.  In the name of equality and fairness, they encourage women and people of color to blend in with others.  Or they set them apart in jobs that relate specifically to their backgrounds, assigning them, for example, to areas that require them to interface with clients or customers of the same identity group.  African American M.B.A.’s often find themselves marketing products to inner-city communities; Hispanics frequently market to other Hispanics.  In those types of cases, companies are operating on the assumption that the main virtue identity groups have to offer is knowledge of their own people.  This assumption is limited and detrimental to the diversity effort.

Diversity should be understood as the varied perspectives and approaches to work that members of different identity groups bring to an organization.

Thomas and Ely explain that by incorporating diversity into a workplace, groups and others outside the mainstream of corporate American bring different, important, and competitively relevant knowledge and perspectives about how to actually do work – how to design processes, reach goals, frame tasks, create effective teams, communicate ideas and lead.  When allowed to, members of these groups can help companies grow and improve by challenging basic assumptions about an organization’s functions, strategies, operations, practices and procedures.  And in doing so, they are able to bring more of their whole selves to the workplace and identify more fully with the work they do, setting motion to a virtuous circle.

A New Shift

So how does your company or organization make the shift to incorporate this new perspective on diversity?  Thomas and Ely outline eight preconditions necessary to avoid any blind spots, missed opportunities, and misdiagnosed tensions, and positions companies to find the potential benefits of diversity.

1. The leadership must understand that a diverse workforce will embody different perspectives and approaches to work, and must truly value variety of opinion and insight.
2. The leadership must recognize both the learning opportunities and the challenges that the expression of different perspectives presents for an organization. 
3. The organizational culture must create an expectation of high standards of performance from everyone.
4. The organizational culture must stimulate personal development.
5. The organizational culture must encourage openness.
6. The culture must make workers feel valued.
7. The organization must have a well-articulated and widely understood mission.
8. The organization must have a relatively egalitarian, non-bureaucratic structure.

For an organization or a business to shift to incorporate this new perspective on diversity requires a high commitment to learning more about the environment structure, tasks of one’s organization, and giving improvement-generating changes greater priority than the security of what is familiar.  It is not an easy challenge, but the authors of this article remain convinced that unless organizations begin to take these steps, any diversity initiative will fall short of fulfilling its rich promise.