Diversity Training Doesn't Work

I know this seems odd coming from someone who does diversity training but, take a listen to this 5:08 minute video, and hear me out. For additional insights, review my post "It doesn't matter if you are racist" from December 2006.

On February 13, 2007, I attended a lecture by Frank Dobbin, a 2006 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is an organizational and economic sociologist at Harvard University. Mr. Dobbin has been studying about 830 firms over approximately 30 years and the impact of a variety of diversity interventions on their ultimate diversity goal - increase the number of women and minorities in management. He has some surprising results, which will be published in an upcoming book.

But the biggest learning was that mandatory diversity training that has a significant portion of the training focused on, what he called, "legal issues" (do's and don'ts of hiring, firing, etc.), actually decreases the number of women and minorities in management.

Voluntary training (build on the Pockets of Readiness) focused on our individual cultural differences (the unique insights we each bring to the table) and how to deal with those differences (accountable to a behavior change) increases the number of women and minorities in management.

The learnings I heard reflect my own experience in providing targeted, site-specific, behaviorially-oriented training over the last 15 years resulting in reduced minority employee attrition.

As I have said before, it doesn't matter if you are racist, sexist or homophobic. What matters is the behaviors you exhibit. And what matters - like every other corporate initiative - is that tangible commitments to progress and success have to be made, and then be held accountable to achieving those objectives.

This is the point of Courageous Conversations. What do you need from me? What do I need from you? And how do we hold each other accountable to those agreements? Regardless of how different or how same we are.

I look forward to talking with you about this information.

Talk to you soon, Tim.