World Class Diversity Management: A Strategic Approach - Couverture rigide

Thomas, R. Roosevelt

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1605094501 ISBN 13 : 9781605094502

Editeur : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010

A propos du livre

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INTRODUCTION

As I begin this introduction, I have been reflecting on previous situations where I have seen accelerated learning and growth through quality dialogue. The situations have been varied, but they have shared one characteristic: Before the discussion began, time was taken to establish a context for the discussion. Often that time was used to establish agreed-upon definitions.

Given the wide variety of perspectives on “diversity” and my experience in working with senior organizational leaders, I propose that we seek some common ground around definitions—if only for the purpose of discussion. Toward this end, I offer a set of definitions for the diversity-related terms that I have used throughout the book.

BASIC DEFINITIONS

Below are definitions that will make the reading of the book more enjoyable and profitable:

Diversity— the differences and similarities, and related tensions and complexities, that can characterize mixtures of any kind. When you speak of diversity, you are describing a characteristic of a collection or mixture of some kind, such as employees, customers, vendors, functions, organizational participants in an acquisition or merger, citizens, family members, or congregants in a religious setting.

This means that when you talk of a group’s diversity, you have to specify the dimension. In the United States, when someone says a group is “diverse,” he typically means with respect to race, gender, or ethnicity. In reality, the dimension possibilities are enormous, thus the need to specify.

In addition, with diversity (differences and similarities) come tensions and complexities. The greater the diversity, the greater the likelihood of tension and complexity.

Diversity tension— the stress and strain that come from the interaction and clashing of differences and similarities.

Complexity— that which makes something difficult to explain.

Diversity management— the ability to make quality decisions in the midst of any set of differences and similarities and related tensions and complexities.

Complexity management— the ability to make quality decisions in the midst of factors that make something difficult to explain.

Capability— the wherewithal to think through diversity issues of any kind in pursuit of quality decisions that support an entity’s overarching objectives. A critical assumption is that the individual or organization (represented by its leaders and managers) can be the actor.

Achieving this wherewithal requires understanding and operationalizing concepts, principles, theories, and paradigms; developing and mastering skills and competencies; and sustaining a high level of craftsmanship through continuous learning and introspection.

WORLD-CLASS DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT

Defined

Practicing World-Class Diversity Management means operating at a level that is the best in the world with respect to diversity management. At a minimum, it suggests the use of state-of-the-art strategies and approaches for addressing any diversity issue in any setting in any geographical location.

Achieving this status doesn’t require an enterprise to operate beyond its country’s borders. It might practice diversity management at a world-class level within its community, state, regional, or national boundaries. The determining factor would be that the quality of its practices cannot be beaten anywhere in the world.

Consider the realm of baseball. The “World Champion” New York Yankees may never play a team from outside the United States; yet, because of their understanding—rightly or not—that United States baseball is the best in the world, they can claim that winning the World Series entitles them to say, “We are world champions.” As the quality of professional baseball outside the United States grows in perceived excellence, World Series winners will not be able to claim “We are the best in the world” without engaging in some competition to prove that point.

With respect to diversity management, we still have to define the game and then determine what it means to play at a world-class level. To date, practitioners and managers have expressed relatively little interest in establishing and pursuing the standards that would allow us to do that.

Writing on the meaning of World-Class Diversity Management has brought to mind my first encounter with World-Class Manufacturing and Total Quality Management (TQM) in the mid-eighties, when the emphasis was on achieving world-class status in manufacturing. One of our first diversity clients placed great stock in being world class. The company viewed world class as the gold standard against which any self-respecting manufacturing organization must mea sure itself. As this company expanded its global manufacturing operations, its managers found that being competitive required familiarity with the best philosophies and practices of TQM and other manufacturing philosophies and tools. This was true for other corporations with global operations and for some with domestic sites only.

This reality led our client to send groups of its managers to attend seminars on different manufacturing approaches, to visit the sites of enterprises that advocated innovative strategies, to invite leading practitioners to tour and assess their facilities, and to devour books on various methodologies—TQM and others. Our clients and other corporations did make significant progress toward world-class status and touted that progress widely internally and externally.

As we began our diversity management work with the organization, its representatives told us that they wanted to be world class in diversity as well as in manufacturing. Given the embryonic nature of diversity at that time, we could not guarantee that our offer was world class. We were comfortable, however, in saying that our approach had the potential to become world class. We also gained credibility by relating our diversity approach to the company’s World-Class Manufacturing practices and philosophies.

My point here is that being world class had become a way of life for our clients wherever they operated a manufacturing facility in the world. As these manufacturing managers interacted with global functions, they often cited manufacturing philosophies and principles. The notion of world class had become ingrained in them.

The diversity field has not progressed to this point. We in the field have neither established what world class is nor specified how it might be achieved. Further, we lack agreement on our most fundamental philosophies, principles, and concepts, as well as consensus as to what best practices are. Indeed, it is not clear that we want to be world class. Some feeling exists that because the field is diversity, practitioners should be diverse (fragmented) in their thinking.

Requirements

Several elements must be in place if we are to establish and achieve world-class status in the diversity arena. These include the following:

Universal philosophies. We must have sets of universal theories, principles, concepts, and frameworks that can be applied to any type of diversity mixture at any geographic location. Aspirants to world-class stature need universal tools as a basis for world capability and applicability. Such tools are not currently readily available in the diversity arena. This book is intended to be a step toward filling that gap.

An approach that fosters ease of comparison, discussion, and analysis across the globe. This data gathering capability will be key to establishing the meaning of World-Class Diversity Management. Diversity means different things to people in different countries. This can be a major barrier to efforts to identify and understand different diversity management philosophies, unless there are a framework and process that fosters global dialogue and affirms and enhances world perspectives.

An approach that fosters awareness and understanding of the field of diversity and not just its individual dimensions. If practitioners are to understand and address the diverse dimension (race, ethnicity, gender, etc.) priorities around the world, they must possess familiarity and competency with diversity per se. That is, they must have access to both individual and collective perspectives. Without that access, they must develop an expertise for each possible dimension. While doable, this can become onerous. A framework with universal and transferable concepts and principles that apply to all dimensions provides a head start with any given issue, by eliminating the need to begin from ground zero in each instance. Most efforts designated as diversity focus on the workforce. That limits the capability to deal with any type of diversity issue.

An approach grounded in a universal process for addressing any diversity issue. Given the multiplicity of approaches to diversity around the globe, world-class status requires a process that can be adapted to any approach and used with any mixture.

Infrastructures to foster the establishment and pursuit of world-class standards. For example, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards program fosters excellence in TQM, while within organizations, entire departments and task forces often are dedicated to the achievement of World-Class Manufacturing.

Obstacles

My initial personal reaction to the notion of world class reflects some of the obstacles. Four in particular merit mention:

1. Lack of professionalization and rationalization. This lack impedes the development of universal frameworks and significant consensus among practitioners. Organizations, practitioners, managers, and individual contributors are struggling to make sense of diversity. Some are so confused that they want to discard the notion. Others have institutionalized diversity into increasingly meaningless rituals. Many organizations are seeking ways to relaunch, reboot, or otherwise rejuvenate their diversity efforts.

While some want to dismiss the idea of diversity, most organizations and communities still struggle explicitly or implicitly with the notion. So there are practical reasons to sort through the ambiguity.

As part of the effort to make sense of diversity, internal and external practitioners are searching for new frameworks. For some, this is a desperate search that leads them to embrace any semantic change that might reflect a substantive modification in approach. Their search would be aided by a rationalized perspective of the diversity field, which would provide a context for assessing the fit between organizational needs and a particular framework—and therefore for assessing its likelihood of success. This would also set the stage for establishing world-class standards.

2. Inability to focus on the big picture—to see the forest as well as the trees. The individual dimensions—race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, thought, globalism, political, functional, or generational—consume the attention and time of many organizations, which emphasize them one at a time and seek practitioners and con sul tants with expertise in the priority of the moment. Rarely do organizations or community leaders focus on learning about diversity as a field. Instead, they continue to reinvent the wheel as they move from dimension to dimension. This mindset and corresponding behaviors hamper the establishment of a world-class standard.

3. Lack of discipline. Inattention to sets of widely accepted, well-defined philosophies, theories, and practices that apply to the whole field of diversity has hampered discussion among those in the field. Developing the field as a discipline will require focusing on the forest and the trees.

4. Lack of face validity. With World-Class Manufacturing, face validity as a legitimate discipline and organizational function has not been an issue. Lack of face validity for diversity, however, has been most apparent in today’s recessionary economic times. People frequently ask me, “Are companies still engaged with diversity?” Among those people are some who never believed corporations were serious about diversity and therefore never had expectations that diversity training would endure. Some observers note how well they are getting along now and express surprise that diversity is still needed. Others suggest that since the United States has elected an African American as president, the country no longer needs diversity work. And still others declare, “Given that we have been ‘doing diversity’ for so many years, surely we can relax now and move on to something else.” The common theme is that diversity lacks face validity and, therefore, has a tentative status and will soon disappear—if it has not already done so.

5. Seeing diversity as a problem to be solved and then removing it from the “to do” list. This perspective contributes to a lack of face validity for diversity and also to the view that an intervention with a beginning and an end is needed—as opposed to the need to build and maintain a capability to cope with issues around differences and similarities on an ongoing basis.

6. Leaders confusing their personal beliefs and behaviors with those of their organizations. This confusion can make it difficult to realize and address collective realities regarding their enterprises.

Potential Benefits

In light of so many obstacles, why is now a good time to pursue World-Class Diversity Management?

One major benefit would be the enhancement of global competitiveness. As globalization increases, few enterprises anywhere in the world—regional, national, or international—will be immune to global competition. To return to the earlier baseball analogy, the more teams around the world play the game, the more U.S. teams must become competitive within national and international boundaries. Enterprises must expand their focus if they aspire to become world class.

A second benefit would be greater organizational consistency across the nation and the globe. Globalization demands that we make sense of diversity and think in terms of world philosophies and practices. Yet there is little consistency with respect to diversity across national boundaries. For example, U.S.-based global corporations are finding that other countries resist American-style diversity activities—rightly or wrongly—on the grounds that they do not have the same issues as those related to America’s history of slavery and race relations. These companies do understand the need for consistency between global and domestic diversity thrusts, however, if they are to demonstrate commitment to diversity and also achieve efficiency and effectiveness with their efforts. A rationalized world perspective of the field would facilitate such consistency.

Without understanding the forest (the whole) of diversity, organizational diversity leaders treat their domestic and international arenas as two unrelated trees (dimensions). Chief diversity officers sometimes say with pride, “We are doing global diversity now.” An implication is that “global” is better and represents a move to the next level, that the domestic issues have been mastered. A rationalized perspective would encourage integration of the two arenas within the context of the diversity forest.

A further benefit of developing a World-Class Diversity Management concept is that it would free organizations and individuals from their current imprisonment by domestic diversity paradigms (mindsets). The resulting in de pen dence of thought would help organizations to move toward the next level with their diversity management efforts.

For some time, I have known about the impact of paradigms on the behavior of indi...

Revue de presse :

“The most important work in the field of diversity that I have read in recent years. It displays amazing insight into the challenges of the current state of managing diversity yet ignites the imagination about what is truly possible. A must-read book for every CEO, senior leader and professional practitioner of diversity in any industry."
—Frederick D. Hobby, President, Institute for Diversity in Health Management, American Hospital Association

“This is an indispensable book for any leader or talent management professional who wants to support the progress of a diversity initiative. Dr. Thomas has spent a lifetime providing us with models that have refined and extended our thinking.”
—Beverly Kaye, founder and CEO, Career Systems International, and coauthor of Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em and Love It, Don’t Leave It

“Dr. Thomas is a true pioneer in the field of strategic diversity management. This book is a continuation and extension of his decades-long legacy of thought leadership. His insights and approach are a targeted guide to what’s needed to thrive in the future and allow all of us— organizations and individuals—to reach our full potential.”
—Mike Prokopeak, Vice President and Editorial Director, MediaTec, publisher of Diversity Executive, Talent Management, and Chief Learning Officer

“The trials, tribulations, and opportunities facing fictional CEO Jeff Kilt in the latter part of the book sound all too familiar! Kilt is a composite of many well-intentioned leaders who lack a framework or process to achieve world-class status—a case study on the shortcomings of good intentions alone. For those who have wondered what’s next in the field of strategic diversity management, this guide is it.”
 —David L. Casey, Vice President and Diversity Officer, CVS Caremark

“Roosevelt Thomas stimulates the reader with a compelling conceptualization, authentic examples, and thought-provoking analogies, such as how changing an organizational culture is comparable to changing an individual’s personality.”
—David A. Kravitz, Professor and Management Area Chair, School of Management, George Mason University

“This important book provides fresh insights and a strategic process that will assist governments and market-based leadership in developing national diversity policies and strategies.”
—Robert L. Lattimer, Senior Fellow, Diversity Studies, Rutgers University

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Date d'édition: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1605094501
• ISBN 13: 9781605094502
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 312