The XYZ Company is not living up to its promises. The thought comes to junior executive Greg J. as he walks back to his office following the second hostile encounter with his boss in two days. "And today is only Wednesday," he tells himself and shakes his head. When he took this job after graduating from business school six months ago, Greg believed he was going to work for a progressive company, one that knew how to manage diversity − not a traditional company "stuck back in the 50s.”
Greg and fellow students quickly adopted the ideas of R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., one of America’s leading spokespersons on managing diversity and president of The American Institute for Managing Diversity, which Thomas founded in 1983 at Morehouse College.
Greg liked Thomas’s description of an awakening taking place regarding management in this country’s marketplace as the population moves to increased diversity. Managing diversity is an idea whose time has come as organizations and businesses are increasingly recognizing that a diverse work force is not more trouble for managers, but represents their greatest potential strength − when properly managed, he learned from Thomas.
“This awakening must have happened while I was over in Iraq,” Greg mused one day while going over class notes: “The manager who best understands it takes a diverse work force at all levels of the company, including senior management, best serves the organization,” his professor had lectured.
Greg and his classmates learned how the U.S. labor force “now and for the foreseeable future” will be largely composed of women, minorities, and immigrants. This group will constitute about 85 percent of the new entrants in the work force, according to a landmark study by the Hudson Institute.
They read in their professor's course syllabus that “Companies now realize they must attract, retain, and promote this full spectrum of people just to keep the business running. So great is their need that advice on the management of diversity has suddenly become a growth industry,” (borrowing a quote from Dr. Thomas’s classic book, “Beyond Race and Gender.”)
His business school even took heed to Thomas’s message, and its students represented a dramatic change, moving from mostly traditional young white males to the mid-sixties woman sitting next to Greg (who appeared even younger than the Laotian man sitting at the front of the classroom and still perfecting his English). Greg was a returning, disabled veteran, retraining from the field of education. This multicultural classroom with new ideas coming from so many unique perspectives had inspired and challenged the entire group of students, as well as the professor.
But now, back at XYZ, Greg fully realized how this company’s attempt to force today’s reality into yesterday’s management patterns was seriously jeopardizing the viability of the entire enterprise.
Just this morning, Greg attempted to share ideas about a problem he observed with marketing a new product. “Maybe we should consider finding a new marketing firm, one that understood the Latino culture, since this product were be a perfect fit for Hispanic Americans newly immigrated to the United States,” he suggested. Greg knew quite a lot about this market, after graduating from Spanish language classes through the Army while a Reserve soldier, and studying cultural diversity, multiculturalism and the growing Latino population in the U.S. From this experience, he knew the XYZ product would be a shoe-in for working-class Latinos.
But Greg’s senior XYZ executive boss, even before Greg could finish his last sentence, quickly interjected he didn’t have time to hear such ideas, and that Greg was “stepping out of bounds” with this suggestion. Greg was hired as an accountant, afterall, and marketing was “not his problem,” he reminded the new hire.
Managing diversity, as a way of thinking, is new and very different from traditional business perspective. While the traditional focus has been on individual and interpersonal aspects alone, what is new is seeing diversity as an issue for the entire organization, even involving the very way organizations are structured.
The way organizations are managed and the way managers do their jobs is critical to diversity management. It is grounded “in a very special definition of ‘managing’; creating an environment that allows the people being managed to reach their full potential. At best, it means getting from employees not only everything you have a right to expect, but everything they have to offer,” Thomas writes.
Greg, a white male from the traditional “dominant culture,” had much to offer XYZ, coming from his unique knowledge gained from world travel and multicultural studies. But after this final incident, Greg knew he would never fill his true potential by staying with a company that had no time for his ideas.
“Their loss, my gain...” he sighed and began packing his personal belongings.
-----------
By Susa Klopfer, M.B.A.
Diversity consultant, speaker and author
An excerpt from "Profit From Diversity: Getting Along With Others."
CreateSpace Publish Date: November 15, 2010 (National Education Week)
No comments:
Post a Comment