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Diversity's Bad Rap
January 20, 2012
Sara Taylor

The other day one of my clients got me thinking about our practice of Diversity and Inclusion. She was concerned about the fact that we don’t have one definition for Diversity that all practitioners consistently use. A few hours later I was still mulling this over and looking to other disciplines similar to Diversity to see just how they have “figured it out.” I thought about both the disciplines of Organizational Development and Leadership, disciplines in which I'm actively involved. Neither of them has just one sole definition that all of its practitioners rally behind. In fact in one of our Leadership courses we actually study various definitions of Leadership and look at the value of those diverse perspectives.

So why then do we feel as though the discipline of Diversity needs just one definition? Likewise, why do we think we need to take time to state that definition before any D&I training? At first I thought, “Well, it’s just that many people still don’t have a shared understanding of what Diversity is.” Yet, I know that’s the case for Leadership and OD as well. I think the real difference is that the subject of Diversity still has a negative connotation for many. In fact in some workplaces, I think the word has a polarizing effect. Whether that is due to past experiences of bad Diversity training they’ve been mandated to attend or even personal misunderstandings across difference, it’s that bad rap that we as D&I practitioners need to acknowledge. It’s the elephant in the room that we try to address when we give our definition. Unfortunately, until we can shift that bad rap to a more complete understanding of the benefits of Diversity, we’re going to need to keep taking our time to define it.

Diversity definitions
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Your Culture: Get Out of the Passenger’s Seat and Drive!
January 5, 2012
Sara Taylor

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” a quote frequently attributed to Peter Drucker, sums up the recent fervor to focus on organizational culture. Yet, with all the talk, why do we see little action—few organizations that actually change their culture? Culture catches us because we typically don’t see it as something we can change, tweak, or improve. Instead, we show up everyday saying things like, “This place is crazy;” or “This is so frustrating. I wish we could do things differently.” When we talk about our workplace in this way, we’re not in control, our culture is. It is our culture that drives our environment and the way we do our work instead of us driving and shaping our culture. We become resigned to it as if it were some unruly, entity outside of us. While everyone in the workplace contributes to the culture on a daily basis, leaders have the most leverage to influence and change it. To do so, they must first understand what culture is. It’s the “way we do things around here.” It’s the unwritten rules of their workplace that shape the environment and behaviors. Then, leaders must be able to fully see all aspects of their organizational culture—are we, to name a few, risk-averse or risk-taking?; process-obsessed or process-indifferent?; hierarchical or egalitarian? Then comes the key question. Once leaders can fully describe their organizational culture with detail, they need to ask themselves: “Is this culture the culture that will best enable us to reach or organizational vision, mission, and strategy.” 99% of the time, the answer is no. That’s when leaders need to take charge and figure out what that ideal culture is. They need to drive and create the effective culture they need versus being driven by the ineffective culture they have.

Cultural Moment
organizational culture
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To Protect and Serve
July 26, 2011
Aaron Kesher

There’s really never a good time to arrest anyone. However, as the F.B.I. showed during the recent arrest of a Florida imam, there are better times, and more effective ways, to approach such a potentially explosive situation.

Arrest procedures exist for good reasons, of course: to protect the lives of all involved—officers, suspects, and bystanders. And for that reason, these procedures are often seen to overrule any other considerations. Yet in this case, paying attention to the differences involved, and therefore adjusting the procedures, resolved the situation far more successfully than might have happened if the agents had gone by the book.

By making a few simple adaptations to the cultural context (waiting until prayers were finished, removing shoes in the mosque, addressing the imam in his native language, not handcuffing him until they had left the mosque and, perhaps most importantly, keeping the larger Muslim community respectfully informed), the lives of all involved were protected, the dignity of the suspect and the community were preserved, and a valuable model created for similar situations in the future, whatever the cultural context.

 

cultural differences
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Legislating Identity
May 20, 2011
Aaron Kesher

In a recent article about the current movement in the Minnesota legislature to ban gay marriage by amending the state’s constitution, Sen. Warren Limmer, the author of the bill, asked an interesting question in relation to the LGBT community and civil rights protections:

“[Sen. Limmer] offered his view on civil rights based on sexual orientation versus those based on race. “Sexual orientation may be perceived as more of action [sic],” he told the committee. “Do you teach a person to be black?””

Can you “teach a person to be black?” I would say yes, absolutely—by your interactions with them. Even if they don’t necessarily consider themselves to be black. And of course we’ve had plenty of laws in the history of this country that helped support that particular education, laws that any legislator would now condemn.

What’s the long-term social impact on legislating identity? Again, if history teaches us anything, it’s that the need to define someone, even in counter-intuitive sense of removing their ability to claim a particular identity (as in reducing gay identity to an “action”) is a step towards a dangerous edge, an edge that, as a country, we’ve stepped over before—to our own detriment.

It’s time we learned our lesson.

Cultural Moment
Gay marriage, gay rights legislation
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It’ Time for Leadership Development that Actually Makes a Difference
May 11, 2011
Sara Taylor

Here’s my revised and updated definition of insanity for our industry: doing the same Leadership Development we’ve always done and expecting different results. Today’s Leadership Development needs to prepare leaders for today’s workplace, not for the workplace of the 20th Century. Seems obvious, right? Yet, how many of organizations offer up programs that are either in the same format or teach the same old leadership frameworks—ones that were created back in the 1950s? Too many. The real problem with this is that we can’t understand why we aren’t getting different results. To be effective, we know that both the how and the what of Leadership Development today need to be different.

First, the how needs to move outside of the classroom and into the daily lives of leaders. Call that “Action Learning,” “Applied Learning,” or “On-the-Job Training;” at deepSEE, we call it common sense. A recent article, "Real Leadership" in Twin Cities Business (May 2011) lays out the advantages of this approach and the best practices of the organizations that are using it. Essentially, today’s Leadership Development that makes a difference goes beyond training and includes real-life organizational projects, coaching, mentoring and targeted assessments and development plans. It allows leaders to practice and apply what they learn in the classroom for real results in the organization.

But it’s not just the how that needs to change. We also need to take a look at what we’re teaching today’s leaders. There’s no doubt that the current workplace is different than the workplace of even just a decade ago. It’s faster-paced, diverse, change-oriented and, thanks to our current economy, also more efficient. To lead in this dynamic environment calls for new and more refined competencies such as Change Management, Cultural Competence or Leadership of Remote Teams, to name a few. These competencies provide leaders with new lenses to SEE the burgeoning challenges of their workplace from a different perspective and then adapt to those challenges with more effective approaches that better meet the needs of their team and organization as a whole.

So, here’s to bringing sanity to our Leaders with Development that meets their realities and makes a difference in their organizations.

Cultural Moment
21st Century Leadership, Action Learning, Leadership Development
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