As I read Michael Watkins’ article, I began to think about the various organizations of which I am a member. What sort of cultures do they have? How do I contribute (or not) to the fostering of that culture? What do I like and dislike about each? I have been reflecting lately on how lucky my wife and I both are to have jobs which allow us to work from home during the pandemic. While both jobs have their fair share of stress, I find that my company has been much better about establishing a work/life balance. This comes directly from the CEO, who has been an advocate for such a balance prior to the pandemic. Moreover, since the beginning of self-isolation, he and the rest of the leadership team have been emphasizing the importance of self care during this time. This includes taking time away from work to focus on one’s physical, emotional and mental health.
The McKinsey report on diversity immediately reminded of the diversity discussions we’ve had at work. In particular, during the last several IT leadership conferences, there have been presentations and discussions around the company’s efforts to improve diversity at every level of the organization.
I found one such presentation particularly memorable. The speaker acknowledged that while most discussions on diversity focus on such important areas such as race and gender, diversity of thought and experience are equally critical to an organization’s success. To illustrate his point, he displayed a diagram representing a small team. The team was made up of six boxes. He then told us that leadership were interested in adding some diversity to the team. On the screen popped up a number of circles, triangles, rectangles, ovals, etc. This represented the candidate pool. Leadership decided to hire the triangle, and a new team diagram was displayed. This time there were six squares and the triangle.
The next slide simply said “One Year Later”, before switching to another featuring seven squares. The speaker then shared a warning. It was of course wonderful to strive for diversity. However, without an openness to different perspectives and a willingness to try new ideas, organizations run the risk of converting triangles into squares.
Hi Mike, I agree that diversity in race and gender can play a monumental role in the way success is achieved. to make a community strong and multi faceted it must be able to implement new ideas and access alternate opinions in order to see positive change. Individuals are encompassed by their backgrounds and their experiences. The ability to bring them to an environment such as the workplace means the world when a group of people are striving for a common goal. I believe your job is such a successful and welcoming place is due to its openness to new ideas and cultures and its compassion towards each individual.
Mike, I think that presentation given at your company is a fantastic analogy of the resilience that an organizational culture can have.
I have met many new leaders at my own place of work who were
ambitious and very positive people. They were new to our field of work, though they were eager to learn and make meaningful contributions to the company.
However, a closed minded culture can cause a great deal of resistance to change. This inertia has often been too great for these new leaders to overcome. I’ve seen them slowly start to adopt the same beliefs as the masses which leaves many of our problems unchanged and unchallenged.
I guess this begs the question, How do we get employees to be more willing to embrace change and challenge current beliefs?
These are perpetual challenges–how do we make change and pull people along for the ride such that they see the value and not just the difficulties?
Mike, I appreciate the simple anecdote you shared from your workplace. That comment on the importance of ‘diversity of thought and experience’ is a critical point I hadn’t even considered or really found across the readings until you brought it up just now. Often times I find when people engage in discussion they sometimes get lost hanging onto statistics, graphics, or any relevant discourse to support their argument. Thinking back to the theme of this weeks readings, I would make the claim that the speakers rhetoric was what really made that presentation memorable. Communicating in layman’s terms instilled a message that could go beyond any single organization or platform, as we both were able to take away and understand here in this blog post.
And it’s important to consider where diversity of perspective is rooted–in our life experiences. Our identities are comprised of much more than race and gender–our social class, geography, educational background, how we were raised, religion, family status, disability status, and much more affect our perspective, our relationships, and our approaches to problem-solving. Now, it happens that many of those features do correlate with some of the more visible traits of diversity like race and gender. It’s important to think about that as we contemplate diversity programs that focus on these.
The last few months have certainly given us a front-row seat to the culture of organizations we’re part of–how they make decisions, how they prioritize, how they communicate with their employees and the public, etc. Crisis tends to be pretty revealing….