The End of Diversity (Excerpt)

Published on Monday, 07 May 2012 03:59

By Martin N. Davidson

Excerpted from The End of Diversity as We Know It: Why Diversity Efforts Fail and How Leveraging Difference Can Succeed

Traditional ways of managing diversity won’t always help leaders take advantage of the differences present in organizations. In fact, sometimes these approaches actually cause problems that destroy, rather create, value. This book is about how organizations can thrive by making the most of the diversity that is right there among their stakeholders. The “Leveraging Difference” approach is designed to foster superior firm performance, both in the present and the future. Drawing on examples from organizations in the United States and around the world, my goal is to guide readers in moving from traditional methods of managing diversity to fully leveraging difference.

…I was working with a team of executives from a Fortune 100 company, helping them to increase the numbers of African American and women managers. After a particularly lively meeting with the chief operating officer and some of his direct reports, I was feeling pretty energized by their commitment. I felt I could help them with their efforts. During the break, the COO approached me to chat about a variety of things—our families and our professional histories, including my experience helping companies like his navigate through tricky issues like diversity. We talked a bit about some of the current strategic challenges for the company, and I sensed he was pleasantly surprised that we could have an engaged conversation about strategy, operational efficiency, and supply chain frustrations—I don’t think he expected that at a diversity program. Since our first meeting four weeks prior, we had been building a nice rapport together.

After several minutes of conversation, he said, “OK, let me ask you a question. And this is a question I won’t ask in the room.”

Of course, I was intrigued. He went on, “Let’s say you help us to really get some traction and we are able to up our numbers of women and African Americans. That would constitute a success, right?”

I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I played along. “Definitely,” I said.

“Yeah,” he shot back. “So what?”

He had caught me off balance. I had assumed it would be obvious to someone like him. “Look,” he continued, “I have a lot of confidence that we can make some of these talent management changes. Our HR folks are top notch and I can see this working—we will get more qualified African Americans and women in this company. But how is this really going to make a difference for this business, above and beyond the PR? We can get all the different colors of the rainbow at the table, but what difference will it really make?”

This COO was thoughtful on issues of diversity, and he genuinely wanted to understand how to take advantage of diversity for his company. He needed an answer that would both help him recommit to the importance of diversity and help him credibly lead his people in developing and committing to practices that would sustain diversity in the organization.

He needed a new framing for diversity. He needed to learn about Leveraging Difference.

After Managing Diversity

Business bookshelves and academic journals are replete with titles about how to “manage diversity,” as though the inevitable reality is that once you put different people and perspectives together, anarchy will ensue and the chaos that develops will have to be managed! In fairness, all of us can probably remember being put together with someone quite different from us and experiencing some disruption as a result. But there are also numerous examples of differences creating synergy and harmony. What if the most important leadership activity might actually be to catalyze diversity, not just manage it?

This question is at the core of the distinction between traditional Managing Diversity and the new Leveraging Difference. Table 1 offers a more refined picture of what distinguishes the two ways of looking at diversity.

TABLE 1: Distinguishing Between Managing Diversity and Leveraging Difference

…In this book, I have critiqued Managing Diversity as an approach to dealing with difference whose day has passed. But I have not emphasized one of its strengths—an attribute that seems to be lacking in the Leveraging Difference frame. Managing Diversity was built to create change in a way that would provide access to members of groups that historically had been shut out. People of color, women, people with disabilities, people with LGBT orientations, and others with traditional differences were (and are) systematically discriminated against in this country. Managing Diversity efforts have helped close the gap in some areas, though disparities are still evident in hiring, development, and advancement. Contrary to the belief of some, we are not in a “post-racial” America, nor are we are post–anything else. The enduring challenges of oppression and discrimination based on these differences will take time and effort to remedy. We must continue to engage in such differences in order to create equity and justice for everyone…

My worry is that leaders might read about Leveraging Difference and breathe a sigh of relief. They might be thinking, “Ah, here is a black man who is saying it’s okay not to focus so heavily on race. And it’s also okay not to focus on these other differences that are tough and intractable and controversial. Now we can just get back to work.” I make no assumption that these individuals would be malicious, negligent, or ill willed in any way. I simply see them as leaders trying to manage many complex tasks and feeling relieved that one of the thorniest is off their plate, thanks to the Leveraging Difference rationale.

If that were to happen, it would be a radical misreading of the text.

Leveraging Difference does not compromise important values and goals for equity and justice. Quite the contrary, it strongly reinforces them. In the introduction to this book, I shared a story about a group of executives who were discouraged by their CEO. When I made the comparison between their experience of disempowerment and that of African American employees, it was not coincidental that the group I referenced was black people. Disempowerment doesn’t routinely happen to just anyone: there are differences that are particularly challenging, and I have found that to be so in every country I’ve visited or studied. In the United States, one of those challenging differences is race.

Oddly, that’s not bad news.

When there are predictably intense dynamics surrounding a particular difference in a given cultural context (like race in the United States), learning how to navigate around that difference is often the best—and most efficient—way to develop a general Leveraging Difference capability. It offers an opportunity to see difference more clearly (e.g., what are the differences within racial groups?). It provides tremendous opportunity for dialogue and experiences that deepen cross-difference understanding. A wide range of experiments could present themselves as a result. And don’t worry: such inquiry will almost always have strategic implications. Labor markets, customer bases, and supplier markets are bound to include the given type of diversity and provide opportunities for value creation.

Intriguing discoveries can be made by focusing a Leveraging Difference process on one of the traditional differences. In working with one leader, a colleague and I challenged him with the paradox that in order to make progress in the career development of his African American employees, he had to stop focusing so much attention and so many resources on them. It sounded crazy at first. Stop focusing on the people who seemed to be struggling most? But we explained that the well-intentioned desire to support his black employees had the unintended effect of spotlighting them and creating even more organizational pressure for them to perform. That was actually causing their performance to diminish. The dynamics of differences aren’t always obvious, but they can be learned.

By the way, there is no need to limit the “difference laboratory” to a focus on race. Similar benefits could result from doing a deep dive with any strategically relevant difference that also includes a legacy of systematic inequity. The point is that approaching these differences, not avoiding them, is the recipe for success.

At the core, wanting to do the right thing is admirable. Actually doing the right thing is ultimately much more important, and often much more challenging.

Martin N. Davidson is Associate Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the Darden Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia, and former Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer. His work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Personality, and the Journal of Conflict Management; he is a popular guest on National Public Radio. An active consultant, he works with Fortune 500 firms like Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management (where he held the appointment of External Advisor for the Office of Diversity), AT&T, Credit Suisse, DuPont Corporation, and Hewlett-Packard. The End of Diversity as We Know It is his first book.

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