our country is as diverse as it's ever been but it's also as divided as sever
bill there was a time when we were really talking about male-female
black-white in America that was it and now we've added all of these additional
dimensions of diversity we are we're now realizing that diversity is not the Holy
Grail we thought that once you achieve diversity you've made it happen and the
reality now is that inclusion is the real Holy Grail so here we are with a
country where we have achieved diversity and we have a whole nother set of issues
and that is when you bring all of these diverse people together they you realize
that it's hard to manage diversity and that's where inclusion comes in and
making sure that you get the most out of this diversity so diversity can be great
net-net it can also have some major
disadvantages if not properly managed if you talk to people who are 40 and older
it's is this really about quotas is this really about affirmative action it's a
very compliance oriented conversation and it's always you know like is this
just to keep the company out of trouble when you get into the younger generation
so 40 and younger and that includes some you know Generation X's and then you go
into the Millennials and even now the Generation Z does their generation they
understand the other value to diversity and and they want to understand how a
company can tie diversity to its competitive sort of environment what's
the competitive advantage of diversity so they're not as much interested in the
compliance side of it they want you to be able to make a case to them that
diversity shouldn't matter to them by the way whether or not they are black or
white or male or female etc but why does diversity matter and therefore it will
help them understand why the company is so invested in it by the way I just was
asked us recently and it it was a cold hit but I was at a conference and they
said can you tell us who does DNI well and I said candidly no I don't know of a
company that does it well some are good and are trying to get good but by and
large doing this well has evaded us all I can tell you this generally what we're
seeing organizations do is one begin to identify the focus on unconscious bias
and that all of us have them so this is not just a white male problem it is
everyone's problem we all bring our biases into the workplace if it's a bias
against someone who's overweight if it's a bias against someone who is not born
in the u.s. we all have them black people have biases as well and so what
I've learned and seen is that organizations who who spend their time
explaining to everyone that they have skin in this game and that they
themselves can benefit from diversity training are doing well the second thing
that we're seeing from a the companies that actually get it spend more time
focusing on commonalities than differences one of the earliest sort of
challenges that I predicted would come out of this diversity focus and we're
talking two three decades ago was we started talking about embracing our
differences tolerating our differences and it was such a maniacal focus almost
maniacal on differences valuing our differences and the fact of the matter
is that sort of counter to how the human experience actually works if I walk into
a room full of people who are by definition different from me the first
thing I do is I begin trying to find what we have in common so I ask you
where'd you go to college where'd you grow up tell me this what
I'm trying to do is to find our commonality once we can find those
things that we have in common we'll get to know more about our
differences but it has to be rooted in our commonality diversity and most of
the early sort of diversity strategies really focused on our differences and I
think we've learned the companies that are doing this better now understand
that start with a commonalities so that we can ultimately respect our
differences
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