The Problem with Managing Diversity

Don’t let the portrait I’ve painted obscure the positive results that diversity, once catalyzed, can produce. Diversity can increase sales performance. Focusing on targeted types of diversity can enhance productivity, widen the pool of talent flowing into an organization, open up new markets, and increase overall organizational effectiveness. Diversity in groups can foster cohesiveness and teamwork, improve communication, accelerate decision-making, and generate innovation and creativity.

Yet in many organizations these benefits of diversity are not being realized, and research helps us understand some of the reasons why. For example, diverse groups that perform effectively tend to handle conflict early in the group’s formation by channeling it toward accomplishing the task, not toward group members. Interpersonal conflicts will pop up within any group, especially one whose members have diverse backgrounds and divergent views. But high-performing diverse groups perform well because they practice disagreeing about task-related issues before they disagree about personal issues.

But there are larger reasons for the failure of traditional diversity approaches. Throughout this book, I’ll refer to these traditional approaches as “Managing Diversity” approaches. Managing Diversity describes a set of difference-related activities practiced in most U.S. organizations. These activities are readily adopted and, when well executed, are considered best practice. A number of resources such as corporate benchmark reports and analyses of diversity management approaches converge on the set of Managing Diversity practices and activities that includes the following:

• Ensuring senior leadership commitment

• Articulating a business-case rationale

• Creating an office of diversity staffed by a senior or chief diversity officer

• Establishing a diversity council of select “diverse” employees from throughout the organization, along with a small number of senior white male managers or executives

• Establishing employee resource groups (also called affinity or network groups) based on demographic identities such as race, gender, and sexual orientation

• Focusing on the recruitment and hiring of women and people of color

• Promoting the advancement and retention of minorities using both mentoring programs and sponsorship programs

• Sponsoring ongoing diversity training

• Engaging in targeted marketing to recruit certain groups

• Creating relationships with community organizations that represent target groups

This list is comprehensive but not exhaustive; other activities may belong on it. And none of these is necessarily negative—all of them were good ideas at one point or another. But they haven’t been able to fundamentally transform most of the organizations that have adopted them. Here is why.