The Business of Diversity

Inclusion during a merger - An ABC for the early days

2011-07-11T09:05:00.000+01:00

Having experienced two major mergers I have seen the effect of both including and excluding leadership on engagement, retention and fair treatment. Paying attention to just a few things helps set the tone.

I've captured this as "the ABC". A = Alignment; B = Behaviour; C= Culture and Conflict

A) People are going to be anxious ... grappling with all kinds of issues and differences. It's critical that leaders take the time to get and keep everyone in the organization Aligned. They've got to know where to focus and how they can make a real impact. If individuals get lost here – they may never feel included or be competitive.

B) The way leaders Behave sets the tone. It is a responsibility to make the “new world” a place where everyone wants to give everything they've got - whoever they are. Leaders should demand that team members also behave in ways that are welcoming of others, that show respect and foster great teamwork. Allowing excluding cliques and one-up groups to develop kills the opportunity to create something new and better. It also drives out of the organisation great people who are not seen as “one-of-us”.

C) There are always differences in the way people in different organisations get things done – their Cultures. It's natural to want to preserve those cultures - things people are comfortable with. Not being able to let go of some of that could be detrimental to the business. We need to be able to help people through this issue quickly and constructively. Getting bogged down arguing which approach was best for past situations is a waste. Get people focused on picking the best solutions for their collective future in the business – including ways of working together.

Few people like it - but in a stressful start-up situation – there will be Conflict. In fact there should be some as new teams test their ideas for the future. Leaders need to manage it constructively keeping the focus on resolving issues rather than company heritage, personal styles etc. Conflict needs to be addressed head on. Avoiding it poisons the new organization - just as it's starting up. If and when heritage issues start playing out unhelpfully, everyone needs a quick reminder that the competition is a) outside not inside and b) not waiting for the discussions to be completed!

Inclusion – The Power to Connect

2011-05-16T09:52:00.000+01:00

“Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality…”. _{Charles Eames, Visionary Designer (1907-1978)}

Connecting effectively with clients and colleagues is central to delivering both the outcomes they want and, as a result, the value which organisations need to create. Leaders have a responsibility to their organisations - to deliver the best possible outcomes from each connection relevant to their role. Ideally, differences (diversity) would not prevent us from achieving that. For teachers with diverse students, hotel staff with diverse guests, doctors with diverse patients or leaders with diverse team members – the outcomes (learning, repeat visits, recovery or engagement) should be consistently good. In reality we know that assumptions, attitudes and behaviours triggered by differences get in the way. There is nearly always a connection challenge for individuals and organisations and sometimes a price to pay in terms of customer satisfaction.

When was the last time, even in your mind’s eye, that you walked alongside a customer from their first touch with your organisation to their last? Are you confident that the impression they form of your business will be equally positive, regardless of who they are? Taking the walk right through to the last touch is important. In a workshop with a utility company someone shared a story of a very successful marketing campaign where a multi-lingual door-to-door sales team was very successful in signing potential new customers. Those customers then had to connect with call centre staff to verify the contract. Because the call centre was not equipped with the same language skills some potential customers “pulled the plug” and potential revenues were lost.

In some ways clients, guests or patients are like travellers who want to plug into your power supply – in what may be new territory. How much of a challenge do they face? Do you have one way of marketing products and offering services? Are you effectively offering a single type of socket where some customers are able to plug in but other potentially valuable clients are left disconnected? One practical example is the move to provide more and more services online. We know that this can work and is welcomed by many people. We also know that this kind of connection is not attractive to some potentially important groups of customers. This has been seen, for instance, in reponses to provision of online financial services in India.

For me, inclusive leaders and organisations are like universal adapters. Driven by the outcome they need to achieve for all kinds of people they find a way to create a high quality connection with as many of them as possible.

In this context Inclusion with a Purpose requires us to start thinking about the connections we and our organisations need:

Q. Have we walked (recently) through the journey a customer, client or new recruit makes with us? Have we identified the places where diversity might impact the quality of the connection we make with them? Did we ask for insights from a diverse group of people?

Q. Have we analysed data such as brand awareness / customer satisfaction/ staff engagement scores by demographic group – at the level of detail to create knowledge we can really act on?

Q. Is everyone who is connecting with our clients aware of how their own biases and limiting assumptions may affect the way they provide our service? Have we created in them the ability to prevent bias turning into inconsistent levels of service and satisfaction?

Can You Be Inclusive and Quick?

2011-04-07T19:41:00.001+01:00

The idea of inclusion triggers a wide range of responses from different leaders. In one organisation I am familiar with inclusion was shunned because it would "slow things down" and "involve everyone in everything". It was seen as a potential barrier to speed of decision-making and rapid execution of business plans. The company had a strong hierarchy and my impression was of leaders who saw an inclusive culture as being like an army with no commanding officers. Nothing would get done, no battles would be won.

Many organisations have Speed among their core values or business principles. Here are just a few examples:

Speed and Agility - HP

Speed, Simplicity, Trust - Vodafone

Speed and Agility - Tata Metaliks

Speed and Flexibility - JD Power and Associates

From recent experience, it's not uncommon for leaders to challenge whether inclusion is really compatible with speed. Can you really be inclusive as well as quick? These are important concerns that we should try to address. Thanks to a helpful conversation with my colleague Rachael Ross I’ve begun to put some thoughts together in three areas relating to the issue. I recognise they are of a very systemising nature!

Situation - knowing when it adds value to gather diverse perspectives and ideas.
System - taking a broad perspective and paying enough attention to the potential consequences when decisions are made in isolation
Practices - learning how tools and resources can help us be efficiently inclusive

Situation

We can look at a decision making process through the lens of diversity and inclusion – see the 2 x 2 matrix below. For me there are clearly phases, like idea generation phase, when relatively high diversity adds value. We are “filling the hopper” with ideas or perspectives. Things change at decision time – leaders still retain their accountability for making decisions. It is appropriate to have lower diversity and inclusion. Once the decision is made we go back to higher inclusion - thinking about how to communicate key messages to a range of audiences. Where will different aspects of implementation come on the matrix?

Where do your own work and personal experiences fit on the matrix?

System

In cultures where speed is demanded – individuals inevitably feel pressured to make the decisions they own as quickly as possible. It would be natural to exclude other people from the process, saving the time involved in engaging them. The problem can come when we zoom out and take a broader perspective (see below). What the individual decides, in isolation, may then be seen as a poor choice for the organisation as a whole. Where this requires rework or causes disruption – the quicker decision at the individual level can have a high overall cost.

Practices

Understandably, one concern pace-setters have is that “it will take forever to get everyone involved”. So - how can we be “efficiently inclusive”? How do we make it possible for many brains to become one brain, accessing all the diverse and unique knowledge to solve problems at pace?

Who are the best practice organisations in this area? Please do share your knowledge with me freddie.a@schneider-ross.com

Developing Inclusive Leaders - Exploring Invisible Diversity

2011-03-31T09:39:00.000+01:00

In workshops designed to help leaders develop skills around inclusion I have been using information about the invisible diversity inside the room.

Especially for groups of leaders from the same organisation / function / department it can be a real eye-opener to see just how much diversity there is among their peers.

A pre-workshop survey, interactive voting or physical movement in response to questions can all work well in capturing and presenting real data back to the group.

The debates triggered around issues like attitudes to work/life or conflict management are very powerful.

I've shared some of the materials used on Slideshare.

Diversity Goals / Quotas / Targets / Aspirations – The Impact of Language

2011-03-10T18:23:00.000+00:00

I was recently leading a workshop for a group of HR professionals from several different countries. At one point we were discussing their organisation's ambition to increase diversity at leadership levels and what could be done to help achieve that.

We talked about some of the messages being communicated from the corporate centre. More importantly, we discussed how these messages had been interpreted differently by different people in the room. It illustrated in a very practical way the challenges faced when implementing a diversity strategy globally.

Key messages were being written in English by people with English as their first language. There were good intentions – the messages would help everyone understand the direction being taken and guide their actions. On the ground, the impact was rather different - reflecting in part the impact of differing knowledge of English vocabulary and national cultural norms.

Take the word Goal. In the absence of a common definition, the spectrum of interpretations in the group ranged from a mandatory quota to an optional aspiration. The attitudes and potential actions being driven by these alternatives are dramatically different. At one end – an individual leader could pursue a policy of positive discrimination - potentially illegal as well as risking a destructive level of backlash. At the other – a leader might opt to do nothing risking the loss of diverse staff, personal credibility and corporate reputation.

My experience tells me that different organisations also tend to have rather different interpretations of words like Goal or Talent. For anyone leading an agenda across boundaries of language or culture (national or organisational), inclusion requires dialogue and the creation of common language. For me, that is inclusion in action.

Are you certain that everyone knows what you mean and want to achieve? Do you “take the time to define”?

The Value Proposition for Inclusive Leadership - Slideshare

2011-02-23T22:26:00.000+00:00

I have created a presentation summarising some thinking on:

the value proposition for inclusive leadership and
what a leader can do to manage diversity for higher team performance

The presentation can be found here

Please contact me if you would like to discuss these ideas further.

Consistent Care? Unconscious Bias, Doctors and Patients

2011-02-03T11:04:00.001+00:00

When we need the help of a doctor, solicitor, care worker or sales assistant we hope or expect that we will get the best advice or service possible from them - whoever we are. But are our hopes realised? Or is it the case that (often unconscious) biases and assumptions about people different from ourselves create some big barriers to that hope? If, for example, we unconsciously associate a certain accent with poor education - are we less likely to take the time to provide needed information to someone with that accent?

One doctor from Harvard, Augustus White, has captured his thoughts about demographic differences between doctors and patients and variations in the care and treatment patients experience. He was subsequently interviewed by the Boston Globe and their headline take on his work can be viewed here. You may need to log on to the Boston Globe site for access. Dr. White's book is called Seeing Patients; Unconscious Bias in Health Care.

For me - here is where inclusion comes in. An inclusive approach to providing a service sees an organisation paying close attention to whether diversity is impacting customer experience - taking action where needed. For example, a bank might analyse whether all their customers feel able to access their account information in a way that works well for them. Do some customers with visual impairments report a much lower level of satisfaction? If so, what can be done about that?

Reducing the variability in satisfaction ratings among customers in different demographic groups would be a key indicator of success for an organisation setting out to be inclusive. This focus on outcomes will drive the right investment decisions in terms of understanding and responding to customer diversity.

Why So Few Women at the Top? Facebook COO's Take

2011-01-26T09:22:00.005+00:00

I found this TED video provided a dose of common sense thinking about the limiting attitudes (sometimes self-limiting) which can make it difficult for women to reach the top of all kinds of organisations.

You will see Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg looking at why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions -- and offering 3 powerful pieces of advice to women aiming for those roles.

Click on the blog's title to go to the video.

Testing Hidden Bias at Harvard (Alan Alda video)

2011-01-06T16:14:00.010+00:00

In preparation for workshops it's great to have different ways of encouraging people to challenge their thinking...about themselves. For some time I have been steering people toward the Harvard University research on hidden bias. Their Implicit Association Tests give people an opportunity to reflect on the unconscious biases they may have - along with all the rest of us!

I found a video clip from a Scientific American TV series in which Alan Alda does a test for himself and discusses the results with the researchers involved. Despite their familiarity with the tests, the research leaders also still demonstrate significant unconscious bias based on gender and race. Amazing how persistent these biases are over time. On the positive side there is a discussion of actions which can reduce the impact of bias.

Here is the Alan Alda video

2010-12-14T17:44:00.003+00:00

Insight is the virtual newsletter for Schneider-Ross, the global diversity consultancy where I am Director for Applied Diversity and Inclusive Leadership.

The newletter can be accessed here.

Hopefully you will find something interesting and informative. There's a bit of a theme around inclusion in this edition which we know is a huge issue for many organisations at the moment. Inclusion and Inclusive Leadership is the mainstay of much of our work and we are delighted to be able to share with you an interview with Debbie Laybourn, Group Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Vodafone.

This edition also showcases our new Inclusive Leadership Feedback Tool^TM, our growing role in India and shares our thoughts on elite organisations who are increasingly using inclusion as a means of leveraging better business outcomes.

I look forward to hearing from you with your comments and feedback. You can contact me here.

Applying a Diversity Lens to Improve Business Performance

2010-12-13T11:53:00.005+00:00

The Business Excellence Model is a tool many organisations use to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their business. It looks at both the results being achieved and how the organisation is delivering those results (enablers) see below.

I’ve found that applying a diversity and inclusion lens through this model can be helpful in identifying priorities for action. The version of the model shown below was developed with leaders of a financial services business in India. It helped to condense their business arguments and structure debate about diversity-related changes that would benefit the business. Clearly, this example is high level and for the whole business. Individual units then drill down into an assessment which is more specific to their unique role.

I find it really helpful to start with the results needed from the customer’s standpoint and work backwards (to the left). That way, diversity-related investment in people and processes is aligned with business priorities.

Whatever business model your organisation has – this way of thinking should be helpful.

Interested in more discussion about this?

Contact me here

Inclusion with a Purpose = Consistently Good Outcomes

2010-11-11T10:59:00.003+00:00

“Inclusion sounds good but what is it, what does it look like, what does it get me”? This question, in one form or another, is one I hear often from business leaders. Being inclusive, like being fair, is instinctively the right thing to do. But what actually do you need to do and why? What is the business context?

Only last week a client meeting provided another practical example of looking at what I call Inclusion with a Purpose. The diversity strategy team inside a utility company is reworking their roadmap around diversity and inclusion. Where do they want to go and why? At the same time the organisation is reorganising and rebranding. At the heart of everything sits the ambition to deliver a customer experience which is second-to-none. This is a strong anchor-point for their thinking about operating inclusively. So now the question becomes “what do we need to do to deliver second-to-none experience for every customer in a region with very diverse communities?”

Why is this question so important to the business? Because regulators are increasingly linking future tariff increases to customer satisfaction. Profitability is hard-wired to the experience of every customer. The question creates the landscape for which a specific road map is needed. Now the organisation needs to apply a diversity lens to all the practices which link to customer experience. More questions will need to be asked and resolved.

· Do we have all the data we need on customer diversity in our operating area?

· What kinds of diversity are likely to impact customer experience and how?

· Are our systems allowing us to compare customer experience for different demographic groups?

· What can we learn from different customers about what they need and expect from us to give us second-to-none ratings?

· Does the makeup of our own staff and leaders reflect customer diversity with the empathy that brings?

· How can we access the different perspectives and ideas that could help us develop innovative ways to improve customer experience?

· Which of our core practices deliver consistent outcomes across differences like age or cultural norms and which do not? What needs changing?

· Have we helped our customer-facing staff develop the awareness and the attitudes required to provide consistently good service to every customer?

· How will we measure, report and respond to feedback on service from different groups?

Anchoring the effort in a core business outcome helps define what Inclusion with a Purpose means for any particular organisation. This helps leaders clarify what they need to do and makes it easier to communicate why specific diversity-related actions are being taken. In this case it will also drive greater engagement with diverse communities which links to recruitment and reputation as well as customer satisfaction.

What does Inclusion with a Purpose mean in your organisation?

Inclusion - Part of Being an Elite Organisation?

2010-11-02T16:09:00.002+00:00

Is there a contradiction between being inclusive and being elite in terms of performance and business reputation?

Judging by the actions of many organisations with clear competitive ambitions, the answer is no. They are attaching more weight to inclusion as a means of delivering better business outcomes. Unilever, Barclays, BP and others in the Global Diversity Network (GDN) confirms this shift. They are analysing where and how to integrate inclusion into their operations to improve outcomes.

Much of this effort is driven by the need to connect effectively with stakeholders who are more diverse than in the past. This includes employees, customers, suppliers and joint venture partners bringing with them many individual, cultural and organisational differences. While these new connections may not come easily, remaining inside an existing “comfort zone” limits access to skills and potentially profitable business opportunities.

Inclusion is simply an approach to managing the differences (diversity) strategically and confidently. Companies are sharpening their competitive edge by changing mindset, practices and behaviours. Some brief examples are given below:

Inclusive Mindset - More Connections, More Opportunities

Where once competitive advantage came from inventing in-house and in secrecy, companies must now increasingly embrace ideas from the outside.

Drug discovery is a good example. An increasing proportion of discovery work is carried out by small, highly specialist labs. Competitive advantage for the major players is partly about becoming a preferred partner for these “inventors”. This requires the development of a different mindset where valuing and including people and ideas from the outside is business critical. Is your own organisation genuinely open to ideas, wherever they come from?

Inclusive Practices - It Doesn’t Happen by Accident

For some organisations, it is clear that making practices more inclusive is already generating a pay back.

One GDN organisation, facing huge competition for manufacturing talent in Mexico responded by changing its approach to recruitment. It set out to attract people with disabilities, a talent pool largely untapped at the time. Increased levels of employee engagement and retention have resulted from the change - a phenomenon we have also seen elsewhere.

Which of your practices might exclude people who are potentially important to the business?

Inclusive Behaviours - It’s the Real Thing

At the front lines of leadership and customer service, behaviour is everything. Organisations are investing to ensure that the behaviours of staff really do create an inclusive environment. In retail banking for example, leading organisations are training staff to deal confidently with the needs of customers with disabilities. Increased customer loyalty is a direct result of this effort.

Across industry sectors, we see increasing integration of inclusive behaviours into competency profiles, performance management tools, development offerings and selection criteria. Inclusion is increasingly seen as the way we need to do things here.

How Confident Are You About Inclusion?

You can start to answer this question by analysing:

o How your organisation is most impacted by diversity, internally and externally

o What kinds of diversity affect your business the most e.g. cultural differences

o Whether the attitudes, practices and behaviours prevalent in the business today are sufficiently inclusive to meet the challenges

Estimating the Potential Impact of Exclusion

2009-12-16T16:59:00.005+00:00

During a series of recent workshops I have had the opportunity to ask leaders this question. "How often are the contributions individuals can make to your business being limited by the attitudes other people have about them?" The leaders respond in real time using voting handsets. The votes from 150+ leaders came out like this:

While this is not highly scientific it does represent the perception of a substantial number of senior leaders. This is what they think they see going on. With 71% believing that individual contributions are limited fairly often or frequently by excluding attitudes - removing this barrier is now significant part of their business case for creating more inclusive cultures.

Having the data from within the group, in real time, fosters great conversations about the future role of leaders.

Cultural Differences - Are you ^.^ or :-) ?

2009-08-14T09:15:00.005+01:00

Stumbled across this study of cultural differences and the way people use different facial cues in reading emotions. It involved people from East Asia (who tended to focus most on the eyes) and Europe (a combination of eyes and mouth). Small sample size but seems to align with other studies.

I paste here one section of the article relating to emoticons.

"Emoticons are used to convey different emotions in cyberspace as they are the iconic representation of facial expressions," Jack said. "Interestingly, there are clear cultural differences in the formations of these icons." Western emoticons primarily use the mouth to convey emotional states, e.g. : ) for happy and : ( for sad, she noted, whereas Eastern emoticons use the eyes, e.g. ^.^ for happy and ;_; for sad.

New Source of Data on the Impact of Employee Engagement

2009-07-22T17:15:00.003+01:00

The link between inclusive culture and employee engagement is rapidly becoming one of the strongest business case arguments for inclusion-building efforts. A recent report for the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills compiled a lot of the published evidence for the impact of employee engagement on business performance. Well worth a look if you are developing your own business case arguments, information boards for a workshop etc.

Who Feels Fairly Treated in Your Organisation?

2009-01-25T17:18:00.005+00:00

I’ve been working on inclusive leadership with a large UK organisation recently. For me, fair treatment is perhaps the most important component of inclusive culture. There is a really strong, well documented link between fair treatment and employee engagement. When maintaining engagement is so difficult in these challenging times, treating people fairly seems a low cost though not simple route to pursue.

The company concerned has a regular employee engagement survey. I was really struck by one method of illustrating the “spread” of employee perceptions around fair treatment (see below).

The horizontal axis shows the % of employees responding favourably in terms of seeing their treatment as fair. The vertical axis is the number of units / departments receiving each score (in this case between about 20% and 90%).

There is real power in investigating the differences in leadership practices between the highest and lowest scoring groups. What helps the most?

A version of this distribution can also be used as a fair treatment or inclusion measure for a whole organisation. Rather than simply increasing the average score for fair treatment you might also choose to have goals for improvement of the lowest scores etc..

Assuming enough demographic data is available it would be terrific to look at this kind of profile for different identity groups. Any organisation using Six Sigma should be able to use this kind of technique particularly well.

Fair treatment is fundamental to employee engagement and the resilience of organisations. Are you doing enough to understand who feels fairly treated and who doesn't?

How Inclusive is Your Leadership?

2008-05-15T08:39:00.005+01:00

Inclusion is a wooly word for many leaders. What does inclusive mean in terms of behaviours? People want to know how to put inclusion into practice in their everyday work.

I've been using different versions of a simple self-assessment tool to help answer these questions. It looks at behaviours in six areas:

Creating a supportive environment for each individual
Making sure people are treated fairly
Being a role model for behaviours that make people feel welcomed and respected
Developing diverse talent effectively
Avoiding the impact of biased judgements, assumptions and personal "comfort zones"
Using diversity to get better results

The tool describes a set of behaviours against which leaders can assess their own performance. Better still - copy the tool and have others provide feedback as well.

The work leads to pursuing one or two areas with highest potential for impact.

If you would like a copy of the tool please contact me

Climbing Above Base Camp on Diversity and Inclusiveness

2008-04-29T17:26:00.003+01:00

From base camp in Nepal, explorers aiming for the peak of Everest must first cross the Khumbu Icefall. The crossing requires many resources to be brought together, some personal and some organisational. Ladders, crampons and guides complement vision, experience and courage.

My sense is that in the field of inclusion and diversity many organizations and individual practitioners are struggling to get beyond base camp onto higher slopes. Of course, being at base camp is in itself something to celebrate. People are paying attention, capabilities are increasing and some results are flowing. But, in order to have a dramatic impact on organizational and personal success we have to move higher.

What then are some of the resources needed for ascending the diversity and inclusion slopes? A few come quickly to mind. I suggest we may need them to be available on the mountain.

Nexus for Knowledge and Needs
A tremendous amount of academic research is undertaken with important implications for inclusion and diversity practice. Many of us don’t have the time to review, filter and pack all the nuggets into our rucksacks. Neither can we sustain active connections with many of the thought leaders in the field to influence their direction. I believe real value would flow from creating and resourcing an active nexus connecting the organizational and academic worlds.

Learning Opportunities
If we are honest, a lot of inclusion and diversity practitioners are ‘enthusiastic amateurs’. Many come from business backgrounds. While that perspective is on one hand a great asset, it is also a potential limitation. I was fortunate to learn from gifted mentors and then picked up more knowledge on-the-job. However, a practical curriculum of learning related to inclusion, diversity and organisational development would be valuable to many amateurs – even ‘gifted’ ones.

Business Language and Tools
Most organizations have chosen performance assessment and measurement systems. They create a language and tools with which many leaders and employees are familiar. To illuminate the strong connections between diversity, inclusion and performance it makes sense to use the common business language. We should take the time to convert the value proposition for diversity and inclusion into our local languages of performance.

Peer Challenge
Every diversity leader I interact with could spend their working lives responding to benchmarking requests. How many of those ‘opportunities’ would really drive improvement in our performance? In my view the answer is very few. We need to look for a whole new level of mutual challenge over diversity and inclusion performance.

Rose Tint Removal Kit
As key advocates for diversity and inclusion, practitioners can at times be their own worst enemies. If balanced advocacy turns to what is perceived as zealotry, we lose credibility among the stakeholders. We have to be ready to raise and discuss the real challenges as well as the benefits that diversity creates. When that honesty is part of our process I feel better about our credibility and our platform for change.

Accredited Consultants
More and more consultants see diversity and inclusion as a money making proposition. That’s true both for people with and sadly those without the capability to serve clients effectively. In Europe, where attention to diversity and inclusion is increasing particularly rapidly, there are relatively few world-class consultants. We would benefit from some form of accreditation that separates the genuinely knowledgeable from the opportunists.

With these and many other personal and organisational resources we can get out of base camp and head a lot higher. Pack up – let’s go!

Women Matter

2008-04-28T20:27:00.003+01:00

“At the time I got to meet one or two good women marketers. Most marketers I’d met [until then] were men. What I started understanding very quickly, as I worked with them [the women], is because we were in the diet market, it was only women who really understood women engaged with dieting. It didn’t matter how intellectually smart and how brilliant a marketer you were, as a man you didn’t fully connect with dieting. At the time they’d taken a really bright guy and put him in charge of marketing for the US. When you looked at the way that the insights were pulled together, the way they were driving the marketing thinking, it was completely chalk and cheese. That was because you’d asked a guy to work out how women’s minds work on dieting, versus a woman”.

This is an extract of a recent conversation I’ve had with a senior leader in a food company. I use it to illustrate just one of the ways in which business leaders are beginning to link gender diversity to the performance of their organisations. In my view there are many other situations where the presence of women in organisations can directly tie to performance. We know that more women than men have an empathetic mindset for the challenges faced by others. This feminine characteristic, which of course some men demonstrate, is a potentially powerful aid to profitable new product development. While the masculine mindset is attracted by the challenge of building a great widget, the feminine mind is more likely to scan the environment for widgets that people need and will pay for. Both mindsets are needed and a more profitable future depends on having both.

McKinsey have recently published a report on the value of women in organisations called Women Matter. Mirroring other reports by Catalyst it presents evidence for the positive impact women at senior levels are having on the performance of organisations.

Map and Manage the Impact of Diversity

2008-04-22T10:01:00.013+01:00

There is a straightforward process a team can use to look at the way differences impact their ability to deliver results. The work is all about understanding:

1. Which differences (kinds of diversity) are relevant to what they are trying to achieve and
2. The impact on performance of the differences concerned - both desired and actual.

When the mapping is complete it creates the opportunity to manage diversity in a way which can most help the team succeed.

If we use an R&D team as a working example, what would we actually do?

1. Define the real Success Factors for the team
This helps ground the diversity thinking in the everyday needs of the team. Most of the success factors will have real implications for including and managing diversity.

2. Relate Success Factors to Diversity needed in the team
For an R&D team, having many different options to get to a solution is probably important. So the team should be familiar with different experimental methods, have wide knowledge of solutions to similar problems, have broad external connections and diverse problem solving approaches. For each success factor - we can identify what kinds of diversity should really make a difference.

3. Understand other Important Differences in the team

There will be other differences in the team which may not be relevant to the task but can still impact performance. An example might be age, nationality, physical ability. It’s helpful to know what these are.

4. Map out Relevance and Impact

Use a simple tool like this to build a picture of the way diversity plays out in the team.

Make a map of what it would look like in the ideal case and then one which is an honest picture of the current state. Involve the team (and other people if appropriate) to build the picture. Overlaying the two will identify opportunities for action to improve the team’s performance.

At worst, those differences with low task relevance should have a neutral impact on performance. Those differences with high task relevance should be managed in a way that they have a positive impact on performance.

5. Highlight Opportunities and Make Improvements

An open appraisal of what is wanted versus current reality should identify the key issues needing to be addressed. Take the example below. Here are two instances with major differences between needed (in green) and actual (in red).

With this kind of “mapping” done - a team can begin to look at ways to improve performance. It may be through building greater diversity of some kind or breaking down barriers which some differences are creating.

Diversity is not a black box. If we use some simple tools and open minds it’s possible to work out how it operates in our teams.

Want help in using this kind of approach to understanding the impact of diversity? Contact me here.

Connecting the Dots on Diversity

2008-04-18T08:46:00.008+01:00

“We just didn’t connect at all. I got my sales pitch ready based on the little bit I knew about the buyer. It was a woman in a Turkish company and I convinced myself I knew what was needed. A Turkish company? I thought ‘low-tech, not very sophisticated’. A woman buyer? I thought ‘she’ll be focused on our customer service, not much interest in technology’. I only got through the first minute or two of the sales pitch before she stopped me and said ‘ look, what I really need to know is what's different about your technical solution and what makes it the best fit with our needs’. As I quickly discovered - all my assumptions were wrong and so was the sales pitch. The buyer was a leader in research and development and the company was putting together really sophisticated technical solutions for their own clients. The whole thing was a disaster. She wasn't convinced that we had good enough technology and looking back, I think she felt insulted by my approach.”

Not long ago, I was told this story by a rather humbled salesman. It illustrated how easily our assumptions about different individuals, cultures or organisations can stop us creating effective and profitable connections. This is a powerful, business-focused way to look at diversity.

What Connections Deliver to a Business

Through effective connections we:

· respond to the needs of diverse customers,

· attract recruits in the face of fierce competition,

· motivate and retain different employees,

· form joint ventures which deliver value,

· source and lead successful teams

· leverage information and talent globally

· move into new host communities easily and confidently

ll these outcomes (and many more) rely on interactions between individuals, teams or organisations. Every connection is unique. Not only because the purpose may be different but also because of the diversity (differences) among those who need to be connected. Businesses that excel in connecting diverse stakeholders will have a sharp competitive edge.

Approach Diversity Pragmatically and Enjoy Better Connections.

So what does all of this really mean for leaders? Clearly, stakeholder connections are critical to business and personal success. What may be new for many is the discipline of working out how diversity affects those connections. The way forward is the intentional integration of diversity and inclusiveness into the business. This should not be treated as a separate issue but made part of mainstream operating practices.

The full article these extracts come from is here.

Does More Diversity Lead to More Innovation?

2008-04-16T18:08:00.010+01:00

There are few rigorous, published studies linking diversity and business performance. Many of them don't go beyond correlating the degree of diversity in teams and their performance. The truth is that simply increasing diversity in a group, while taking no other action, has unpredictable consequences. We know that differences among team members can create barriers to effective collaboration as well as creating the potential for better outcomes. When everything else in the environment is the same, there's no clear business benefit to having added diversity.

Two studies I've come across recently start to unpick what diverse teams need to make them outperform more homogeneous ones. Both are in the area of innovation. What they highlight are "X Factors" which enable certain kinds of diversity to be translated into higher levels of innovative output.

One of the studies is Networks, Diversity and Productivity: The Social Capital of Corporate R&D Teams by Reagans and Zuckerman; Organisational Science, Vol 12, No 4, pp 502-517.

Some highlights:

· 220 corporate R&D teams were studied to see whether mixing people who’d been with a company for different lengths of time made a difference to productivity.

· Productivity was measured by looking at outputs including experimental materials and new patents.

· Actually, the diversity alone had neither a positive or negative effect on productivity.

· Inclusive teams (with frequent connections between the members) achieved significantly higher productivity than teams lacking that kind of culture.

· Inclusive teams that also had diversity were even more productive.

· The study's authors point to the different sets of contacts, information, technical skills and experiences this kind of diversity brings to a team.

For me, inclusion and inclusive leadership is all about thinking and acting in ways which optimise the impact of diversity (differences) in an organisation. I see diversity as potential energy which makes generates value only when we put the conditions in place for it to be used effectively.

There are many version of the picture below which tries to show the impact of good leadership / management on diverse teams. It seems there is an increasing body of evidence to back this picture up.

It is potentially a wasted investment to build diversity in an organisation without considering the X Factors, such as inclusive behaviours among peers, which unlock the value in that diversity.

I'm happy to share more insights into those X Factors. Find out how to contact me here.

An Elevator Speech on Inclusion

2008-04-15T19:49:00.002+01:00

What if you have very little time to describe Inclusion in a business context, like in the lift - what could you say?

Perhaps this might help:

You need to talk diversity first!
Everyone working for an organisation has to interact with people who are different from themselves.

Then the impact of the diversity
When people interact the differences are going to have an impact. That could be positive if say, past experiences, are used to develop new solutions. On the other hand it could be destructive if differences like seniority cause people not to listen to one anothers ideas.

Then Inclusion
Inclusion is about optimising the impact of diversity. Important outcomes are at stake. Individual contribution and satisfaction as well as the capability and cohesion of teams can all be impacted, positively or negatively, by differences.

There are three keys to success:
• our attitudes
• the processes we use and
• our personal behaviours

There is no one-size-fits-all template for inclusion. In each situation we need to work out:
• What outcomes we want
• How diversity could impact the outcomes and then
• What specific attitudes, processes and behaviors will ensure the best outcomes?

If, for example, the outcome we want is to capture every possible idea for improvement from a diverse team we would need:
• The attitude that everyone,regardless of role and background can contribute.
• A process for gathering ideas that doesn’t create barriers for anyone e.g. technology that is
accessible by all.
• Behaviors that encourage contribution, like active listening or drawing out introverts.

Diversity, by itself, does not guarantee better results for an organisation. The opposite may be true. But diversity WITH inclusion creates the potential for teams to outperform in areas such as Innovation. More on that in a post to come.