Managing Diversity

According to David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely, it is our belief that there is a distinct way to unleash the powerful benefits of a diverse workforce. Although these benefits include increased profitability, they go beyond financial measures to encompass learning, creativity, flexibility, organizational and individual growth, and the ability of a company to adjust rapidly and successfully to market changes.

The desired transformation, however, 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. Most people assume that workplace diversity is all about increasing racial, national, gender, or class representation – in other words, recruiting and retaining more people from traditionally underrepresented “identity groups.” This is ONLY partially true. Diversity is much more than this.

Diversity is not only “diversifying” the work place by bringing different kinds of people on board, but also “diversifying” the way the work is done at a workplace.

Three perspectives have guided most diversity initiatives to date:
1) The discrimination-and-fairness paradigm
2) The access-and-legitimacy paradigm
3) The learning-and-effectiveness paradigm – the best amongst these three

The discrimination-and-fairness paradigm: This paradigm is perhaps thus far the dominant way of understanding diversity. Leaders who look at diversity through this usually focus on equal opportunity, fair treatment, recruitment, and compliance with Equal Employment Opportunity requirements. Under this paradigm, nevertheless, progress in diversity is measured by how well the company achieves its recruitment and retention goals rather than by the degree to which conditions in the company allow employees to draw on their personal assets and perspectives to do their work more effectively. The staff gets diversified, but the work does not.

The access-and-legitimacy paradigm: This paradigm accepts and celebrates the differences. When this paradigm has taken hold, organizations have pushed for access to – and legitimacy with – a more diverse clientele by matching the demographics of the organization to those of critical consumer or constituent group. In some cases, the effort has led to substantial increases in organizational diversity. This paradigm has a lot of good things – kind of near to perfect – but one: once the organization appears to be achieving its goals, the leaders seldom go on to identify and analyze the culturally based skills, beliefs, and practices that worked so well. Nor do they consider how the organization can incorporate and learn from those skills, beliefs, or practices in order to capitalize on diversity in the long run.

The learning-and-effectiveness paradigm: This paradigm incorporates aspects of the first two paradigms but goes beyond them by, concretely, connecting diversity to approaches to work. Under this paradigm, companies incorporate employees’ perspectives into the main work of the organizations, enhance work by rethinking primary tasks, and redefine markets, products, strategies, missions, business practices, and even cultures. This relatively new paradigm for managing diversity transcends both – the fairness-paradigm that promotes equal opportunity for all individuals, and access-paradigm that acknowledges cultural differences among people and that recognizes the value in those differences. Yet this new paradigm lets the organization internalize differences among employees so that the organization learns and grows because of the internalized differences. Thus, employees can say – we are all on the same team, with our differences – not despite them.