The HBR Diversity and Inclusion Collection (5 Books)

Harvard Business Review

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781647822026
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Push forward diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice at your organization.

The time is now to develop a company culture that seeks and celebrates difference, combats racism, and strives for equity. The HBR Diversity and Inclusion Collection offers the ideas and strategies you need revitalize your D&I efforts for the good of all.

Included in this set are:

• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Diversity
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Women and Leadership
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures
• Racial Justice: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

It contains more than 50 articles selected by HBR's editors from renowned thought leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg, Adam Grant, Robert Livingston, and Joan C. Williams and features the indispensable articles "Toward a Racially Just Workplace" by Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo and "Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity," by David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely. The ideas and insights in the HBR Diversity and Inclusion Collection will help you take bold steps toward progress and equality in your company.

On
Diversity

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First eBook Edition: May 2019

ISBN: 9781633697720
eISBN: 9781633697737

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

BONUS ARTICLE

Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity

by David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely

Why Diversity Programs Fail

by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev

“Numbers Take Us Only So Far”

by Maxine Williams

Race Matters: The Truth About Mentoring Minorities

by David A. Thomas

Leadership in Your Midst: Tapping the Hidden Strengths of Minority Executives

by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce, and Cornel West

What Most People Get Wrong About Men and Women

by Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely

Hacking Tech’s Diversity Problem

by Joan C. Williams

Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women

by Herminia Ibarra, Nancy M. Carter, and Christine Silva

When No One Retires

by Paul Irving

Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage

by Robert D. Austin and Gary P. Pisano

Managing Multicultural Teams

by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern

BONUS ARTICLE FROM HBR.ORG

7 Myths About Coming Out at Work

by Raymond Trau, Jane O’Leary, and Cathy Brown

About the Contributors

Index

Making Differences Matter

A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity.

by David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely

WHY SHOULD COMPANIES CONCERN THEMSELVES with diversity? Until recently, many managers answered this question with the assertion that discrimination is wrong, both legally and morally. But today managers are voicing a second notion as well. A more diverse workforce, they say, will increase organizational effectiveness. It will lift morale, bring greater access to new segments of the marketplace, and enhance productivity. In short, they claim, diversity will be good for business.

Yet if this is true—and we believe it is—where are the positive impacts of diversity? Numerous and varied initiatives to increase diversity in corporate America have been under way for more than two decades. Rarely, however, have those efforts spurred leaps in organizational effectiveness. Instead, many attempts to increase diversity in the workplace have backfired, sometimes even heightening tensions among employees and hindering a company’s performance.

This article offers an explanation for why diversity efforts are not fulfilling their promise and presents a new paradigm for understanding—and leveraging—diversity. It is our belief that there is a distinct way to unleash the powerful benefits of a diverse workforce. Although these benefits include increased profitability, they go beyond financial measures to encompass learning, creativity, flexibility, organizational and individual growth, and the ability of a company to adjust rapidly and successfully to market changes. The desired transformation, however, requires a fundamental change in the attitudes and behaviors of an organization’s leadership. And that will come only when senior managers abandon an underlying and flawed assumption about diversity and replace it with a broader understanding.

Most people assume that workplace diversity is about increasing racial, national, gender, or class representation—in other words, recruiting and retaining more people from traditionally underrepresented “identity groups.” Taking this commonly held assumption as a starting point, we set out six years ago to investigate its link to organizational effectiveness. We soon found that thinking of diversity simply in terms of identity-group representation inhibited effectiveness.

Organizations usually take one of two paths in managing diversity. In the name of equality and fairness, they encourage (and expect) women and people of color to blend in. Or they set them apart in jobs that relate specifically to their backgrounds, assigning them, for example, to areas that require them to interface with clients or customers of the same identity group. African American MBA’s often find themselves marketing products to inner-city communities; Hispanics frequently market to Hispanics or work for Latin American subsidiaries. In those kinds of cases, companies are operating on the assumption that the main virtue identity groups have to offer is a knowledge of their own people. This assumption is limited—and limiting—and detrimental to diversity efforts.

What we suggest here is that diversity goes beyond increasing the number of different identity-group affiliations on the payroll to recognizing that such an effort is merely the first step in managing a diverse workforce for the organization’s utmost benefit. Diversity should be understood as the varied perspectives and approaches to work that members of different identity groups bring.

Idea in Brief

You know that workforce diversity is smart business: It opens markets, lifts morale, and enhances productivity. So why do most diversity initiatives backfire—heightening tensions and hindering corporate performance?

Many of us simply hire employees with diverse backgrounds—then await the payoff. We don’t enable employees’ differences to transform how our organization does work.

When employees use their differences to shape new goals, processes, leadership approaches, and teams, they bring more of themselves to work. They feel more committed to their jobs—and their companies grow.

How to activate this virtuous cycle? Transcend two existing diversity paradigms: assimilation (“we’re all the same”) or differentiation (“we celebrate differences”). Adopt a new paradigm—integration—that enables employees’ differences to matter.

Idea in Practice

The Integration Paradigm

The integration paradigm transcends assimilation and differentiation—promoting equal opportunity and valuing cultural differences. Result? Employees’ diverse perspectives positively impact companies’ work.

Example: A public-interest law firm’s all-white staff’s clients are exclusively white. It hires female attorneys of color, who encourage it to pursue litigation challenging English-only policies. Since such cases didn’t fall under traditional affirmative-action work, the firm had ignored them. By taking them, it begins serving more women—immigrants—and enhances the quality of its work. The attorneys of color feel valued, and the firm attracts competent, diverse staff.

Additional suggestions for achieving integration:

1. Encourage open discussion of cultural backgrounds.
   Example: A food company’s Chinese chemist draws on her cooking—not her scientific— experience to solve a soup-flavoring problem. But to fit in, she avoids sharing the real source of her inspiration with her colleagues—all white men. Open discussion of cultural differences would engage her more fully in work and workplace relationships.
2. Eliminate all forms of dominance (by hierarchy, function, race, gender, etc.) that inhibit full contribution. When one firm opened its annual strategy conference to people from all hierarchy levels, everyone knew their contributions were valued.
3. Secure organizational trust. In diverse workforces, people share more feelings and ideas. Tensions naturally arise. Demonstrate your commitment to diversity by acknowledging tensions—and resolving them swiftly.

Women, Hispanics, Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans—these groups and others outside the mainstream of corporate America don’t bring with them just their “insider information.” They bring different, important, and competitively relevant knowledge and perspectives about how to actually do work—how to design processes, reach goals, frame tasks, create effective teams, communicate ideas, and lead. When allowed to, members of these groups can help companies grow and improve by challenging basic assumptions about an organization’s functions, strategies, operations, practices, and procedures. And in doing so, they are able to bring more of their whole selves to the workplace and identify more fully with the work they do, setting in motion a virtuous circle. Certainly, individvuals can be expected to contribute to a company their firsthand familiarity with niche markets. But only when companies start thinking about diversity more holistically—as providing fresh and meaningful approaches to work—and stop assuming that diversity relates simply to how a person looks or where he or she comes from, will they be able to reap its full rewards.

Two perspectives have guided most diversity initiatives to date: the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm and the access-and-legitimacy paradigm. But we have identified a new, emerging approach to this complex management issue. This approach, which we call the learning-and-effectiveness paradigm, incorporates aspects of the first two paradigms but goes beyond them by concretely connecting diversity to approaches to work. Our goal is to help business leaders see what their own approach to diversity currently is and how it may already have influenced their companies’ diversity efforts. Managers can learn to assess whether they need to change their diversity initiatives and, if so, how to accomplish that change.

The following discussion will also cite several examples of how connecting the new definition of diversity to the actual doing of work has led some organizations to markedly better performance. The organizations differ in many ways—none are in the same industry, for instance—but they are united by one similarity: Their leaders realize that increasing demographic variation does not in itself increase organizational effectiveness. They realize that it is how a company defines diversity—and what it does with the experiences of being a diverse organization—that delivers on the promise.

The Discrimination-and-Fairness Paradigm

Using the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm is perhaps thus far the dominant way of understanding diversity. Leaders who look at diversity through this lens usually focus on equal opportunity, fair treatment, recruitment, and compliance with federal Equal Employment Opportunity requirements. The paradigm’s underlying logic can be expressed as follows:

Prejudice has kept members of certain demographic groups out of organizations such as ours. As a matter of fairness and to comply with federal mandates, we need to work toward restructuring the makeup of our organization to let it more closely reflect that of society. We need managerial processes that ensure that all our employees are treated equally and with respect and that some are not given unfair advantage over others.

Although it resembles the thinking behind traditional affirmative-action efforts, the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm does go beyond a simple concern with numbers. Companies that operate with this philosophical orientation often institute mentoring and career-development programs specifically for the women and people of color in their ranks and train other employees to respect cultural differences. Under this paradigm, nevertheless, progress in diversity is measured by how well the company achieves its recruitment and retention goals rather than by the degree to which conditions in the company allow employees to draw on their personal assets and perspectives to do their work more effectively. The staff, one might say, gets diversified, but the work does not.

What are some of the common characteristics of companies that have used the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm successfully to increase their demographic diversity? Our research indicates that they are usually run by leaders who value due process and equal treatment of all employees and who have the authority to use top-down directives to enforce initiatives based on those attitudes. Such companies are often bureaucratic in structure, with control processes in place for monitoring, measuring, and rewarding individual performance. And finally, they are often organizations with entrenched, easily observable cultures, in which values like fairness are widespread and deeply inculcated and codes of conduct are clear and unambiguous. (Perhaps the most extreme example of an organization in which all these factors are at work is the United States Army.)

Without doubt, there are benefits to this paradigm: it does tend to increase demographic diversity in an organization, and it often succeeds in promoting fair treatment. But it also has significant limitations. The first of these is that its color-blind, gender-blind ideal is to some degree built on the implicit assumption that “we are all the same” or “we aspire to being all the same.” Under this paradigm, it is not desirable for diversification of the workforce to influence the organization’s work or culture. The company should operate as if every person were of the same race, gender, and nationality. It is unlikely that leaders who manage diversity under this paradigm will explore how people’s differences generate a potential diversity of effective ways of working, leading, viewing the market, managing people, and learning.

Not only does the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm insist that everyone is the same, but, with its emphasis on equal treatment, it puts pressure on employees to make sure that important differences among them do not count. Genuine disagreements about work definition, therefore, are sometimes wrongly interpreted through this paradigm’s fairness-unfairness lens—especially when honest disagreements are accompanied by tense debate. A female employee who insists, for example, that a company’s advertising strategy is not appropriate for all ethnic segments in the marketplace might feel she is violating the code of assimilation upon which the paradigm is built. Moreover, if she were then to defend her opinion by citing, let us say...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Diversity
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Women and Leadership
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Across Cultures
• Racial Justice: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review