Diversity Isn’t An Outcome; It’s A Strategy For Business Success
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Founder, Incito Executive and Leadership Development. Helping reactive leaders become strategic and inspiring leaders.
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Most companies have historically viewed diversity as an issue: “We lack it, so we need to have it.” The solutions become reactionary. They may feel that they are missing women from their leadership team, so they add one. Or, they bring in an individual from a visible minority group to essentially fill a quota. But diversity should not be treated as a project outside of your core business operations. When done well, diversity is a business strategy and leads to better business outcomes.
Short-Term Crisis Versus Long-Term Strategy
I used to coach an executive whose organization had prepared a long-term diversity plan but shelved it when #MeToo came about. The same thing happened when the Black Lives Matter movement brought many to question the lack of diversity in major organizations. They pivoted to emergency thinking and responded to “crises,” rather than moving the needle with any of the groups they wanted to include. Instead of staying the course with their plan, which welcomed diverse cultural, gender and ability perspectives, they were reacting and not getting traction, losing the bigger view of diversity in the organization.
To step away from the short-term, reactive thinking around diversity, you must broaden your sense of inclusivity so that you’re not just “putting out fires” and addressing one group at a time. If you are constantly reacting, you end up moving from one fire to another, putting them out as they arise. Create a long-term strategy to increase the entirety of diversity in your organization. While you can still react to new blindspots that come to your attention, you want to stay the course of your overarching diversity strategy. Ask broader strategic questions about what you are creating, not just what you are cleaning up. What is the future workforce and future leadership you aspire to be as an organization five, 10 and 15 years from now? How does the organization that you would be proud to lead look, think and act? Challenge yourself to explore that vision and look at it through the lens of many different groups to create an informed, full picture.
Diverse Leadership Teams And Boards
Real diversity means that there is a great variety of perspectives, personalities and thinking in the organization. Diverse viewpoints bring greater critical thinking, systems thinking, strategic thinking, empathy, courage and innovation. When you view diversity as part of your greater business strategy, it becomes a tool to support your business outcomes. It is integral to effective critical thinking, especially in leadership teams. Otherwise, we are willfully blind to other ways of thinking and don’t have enough to think about the future. This leads to blindspots — what we know is what we know, because we don’t know any better. When we all think the same, we think our viewpoint is the only viewpoint. Diversity in thinking means less homogenous thinking, which means the ability to be courageous is reduced. Diverse workplaces demand the different: They create more humanity and empathy and create courageous culture.
Having a diverse board is a good start to driving diversity in your organization because the board provides perspectives that the senior leadership team members might not consider from their perspectives. Boards exist not only for oversight and to be the conscience of an organization but also to be the challengers of perspective and short-sighted thinking. They exist to expand the perspectives of the senior leadership and consider the longer-term from every angle.
Ensuring A Path To Diverse Leadership
It is one thing to have a diverse workforce and another to create a path for diverse leadership. Because we don’t know what we don’t know, we have to challenge how we view what a leader is. This shows up as a bias in how we interview and promote. Seek out overlooked or nontraditional strengths demonstrated by your team members. Learn about diverse cultures, genders, personalities and backgrounds to understand how strengths show up in different ways other than what you may be accustomed to. Nurture those strengths and go out of your way to give opportunities for growth to a wide range of people. Get really curious about how to develop leaders from different groups of people. Learn about those groups of people and what works to develop them, and also what they need to remove any barriers to development.
Creating a path for diverse leadership doesn’t mean creating leadership initiatives for one group over another, because it can’t be one group’s turn over another. Create a “yes, and” culture of development. Continue to develop your employees and offer consistent development opportunities to new groups and individuals, but also be willing to adapt your idea of development to harness the greatness in different kinds of people. What works to develop strengths in one group may not be the right approach to develop another.
Diversity As A Business Strategy
To truly educate yourself and better understand what diversity means to you and your organization, go out and talk to a variety of groups within your stakeholders, your employees and your greater community. You can’t just dream it up in isolation — you need input to inform your views, unlearn previous assumptions and develop new behaviors.
Diversity as a strategy also does not happen overnight or through a sprint of hiring decisions. In order for your organization to become truly diverse, the timeline is not months to a year — it takes several years to see results, so you have to stay the course. Get clear on why you are working toward diversity because it has to be tied to your business strategy.
Diverse leadership can be linked to greater performance. When diversity is aspirational and tied to your greater business strategy, you have a better chance of receiving buy-in from the organization because it reflects on your outcomes. Be proactive and start asking broader strategic questions today, and start building the foundation for a truly diverse organization that you can be proud of in the years to come.
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