Courageous Conversations

Making Diversity Work

I think I was too harsh on diversity training in my recent post - Diversity Training Doesn't Work - so I wanted to give you some help in making diversity efforts work to create long-running success. (5:05 minutes).

In this post, I talk about our three Development Principles and talk about they have used successfully. Hear about using Feedback Loops and how one client's diversity council was put on "Wanted" posters, set in the cross-hairs.

Development Principles:

Build From Within - Involve as many people as possible, in a variety of ways. Resistance is reduced when employees have a “say” in the outcomes.

Build on the Pockets of Readiness - Leverage the explicit and stated passion of a few to grow and influence the many.

Build Momentum - Small steps can make big changes. Create the feeling of inevitability.

Download the Development Principles

Talk to you soon, Tim.

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.

"You like getting recognition..don't you?"

Donna's employee, Wally, has a hard time being a team player. His work is one part of the greater team's work, but Wally has a hard time seeing that. His tendency is to boost the importance of his own work, while diminishing the value of his teammates. . His inability to acknowledge others contribution is impacting the work of the team as people are avoiding working with Wally because he ends up taking credit for their work. You, Donna, his boss are going to talk with him about this behavior. (10:35 minutes)

Click here to download as an MP3

Lessons Learned

• Stay focused - Wally wants to take the topic off track. Stay focused on the impact of that behavior on him, on you, on the rest of the team.

• Be specific - Stick with observable behaviors. Avoid, "I have been told..." and "People tell me.."

• What is in it for the employee - Why would the employee care about changing his behavior? Ask questions to find out what moves him.

• Be firm - Balance the need to keep Wally in the conversation with conveying the expectations of his role as a team lead.

Download Lessons Learned