This year, give your organization a Valentine. That’s right
- an organizational Valentine. Skip the hearts and flowers
and give them a Valentine that will help them feel valued
and engaged. Do this by making sure that your culture is
inclusive, that the day-to-day practices of your
organization truly include everyone. Your organization will
be more innovative and more successful in the market if you
do.
An inclusive culture means more than just a diverse
workforce; inclusion refers not to who is in the workforce
but to how people treat each other.
I was in the 4th grade and Valentine’s Day was approaching.
Mrs. Arthur made a rule for us that we hadn’t had before.
If we had a Valentine for anyone’s “mail box,” we had to
have a Valentine for everyone’s mail box. She wanted to
ensure that no one felt left out. In your organization, the
behaviors that include or exclude aren’t usually as easy to
identify as Valentines in a mail box but they exert a
powerful effect on how people feel and how work gets done.
Your culture must be truly inclusive to reap the benefits
of a diverse workforce. Inclusion is no longer optional,
something you delegate to human resources, or something you
do only to be “politically correct.” There are many reasons
that inclusion is critical to your success. I want to focus
on two – the market and innovation.
What is the face of your market? Is it uniform and
homogenous or is it diverse and heterogeneous? Pretty
likely it’s diverse – a mix of people from different ethnic
groups, nationalities, genders, religions, and sexual
orientations. People with different thinking styles, world
views, abilities, and disabilities. Will a diverse team
understand that market, anticipate its needs, and intuit
its preferences better than a homogenous team? Pretty
likely. But so far, we’re only talking about diversity. To
create a high performing diverse team, your culture must be
truly inclusive.
A CEO, lamenting the lack of diversity on his Board, put it
this way. “Our client population is very diverse –
ethnicity, socio-economic background, abilities and
disabilities, family status, age — you name it. How do we
expect a bunch of middle-class, middle-aged white guys to
understand and anticipate their concerns?” Good question!
Dealing with this issue doesn’t mean that the demographics
of your organization have to mirror those of your target
market perfectly. But it does mean that your culture has to
support diversity and inclusion.
You know that innovation is key to your success. Innovation
and change are more easily fostered when there are
differences. Let’s take a simple example. Given a puzzle to
solve, mixed gender teams will often outperform teams of
all women or all men. Why? One reason is that men and women
tend to have different patterns of thinking and
communicating. The mixed gender teams thus have a broader
set of mental resources available to them. In systems
language, this is part of the “law of requisite variety.”
According to this law, the system with more variety will
prevail over the one with less variety.
When differences come together in a respectful, open way,
the team “brain” has access to enormous resources.
Differences, creatively engaged, foster innovation.
Building a culture of inclusion is how you make that happen.
Inclusion is not about giving members of disadvantaged
groups a chance or any other socially conscious motivation.
Although being socially conscious is a good thing, the
business driver for inclusion is your success in the market.
Lack of diversity, the “middle-aged white guys” stage
lamented by the CEO above, is a problem in terms of your
connection to, and responsiveness to, your market. Look at
your executive team, your board of directors, your sales
force, your entire company. Do those groups look at least
somewhat like your market? If not, your organization lacks
the diversity that is essential to your success.
This Valentine’s Day, give your organization the Valentine
of inclusion. As the Beatles said, “Love is all there is.”
If your culture is not inclusive, that’s a problem too. It
means that your culture doesn’t offer full respect and
participation to a range of diverse people and styles. Your
culture doesn’t yet enable all employees to participate
fully. A diverse workforce needs this culture of inclusion
to thrive. To see where you stand on this score, you’ll
need to look through the eyes of someone who is part of a
non-dominant group in your organization. If you are a
member of the dominant group, it can be hard to see the
signs of exclusion and disrespect. Those behaviors
generally will not be directed toward you and they are
often inadvertent and subtle.
Without a culture of inclusion, your attempts to create a
workforce that mirrors your market are doomed to fail.
People either will leave or the organization will become
fragmented and unproductive. Add a culture of inclusion and
the disruption becomes creative and innovative,
facilitating positive change.
—————————————————-
Take charge of your organization – free resources at
http://fordbusinessconsulting.com/gorillagoods.html . Dr.
Linda Ford helps leaders create organizations that achieve
superior performance. She has consulted to companies
ranging from small start-ups to Fortune 100 companies as
well as non-profit organizations To learn more about Dr.
Ford, visit http://www.FordBusinessConsulting.com .
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