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The Diversity Disconnect in Business

The term "diversity" really isn't working for businesses. The reason is because you cannot manage diversity. You can accept it, embrace it, or, as one university leader recently wrote me, celebrate it. Ok, that's nice but, honestly, so what?

Before you write me off as an insensitive person, hear me out. In most cases diversity training is designed to somehow make people sensitive to cultural differences. This is nice, and I suppose important, but how does that hit the bottom line? A staged "diversity" picture (like the one above), or ad, or television commercial, or whatever does not reach me. Be honest, doesn't it come across as fake when the truth is that most of these people, if they had their own way, would not spend much time together in real life?

The real issue here is that diversity training is non-strategic to business growth in the sense that it is simply designed to foster good-will, understanding and openness. Again, this is nice but doesn't really qualify as a strategic business objective unless that understanding is leveraged into the real world.

I would much prefer to see organizations and companies doing serious cultural management training. That's the word; cultural management training.

This type of training would be honest, open, transparent, and most important, strategic. It would clearly, in a non-politically correct way, tell you the truth about how to best manage and do business with people you don't know much about. It would tell you the truth about say, how certain people from certain countries really do have a better reputation as workers than people, say from other countries. It would fully and clearly confront stereotypes, not discarding them automatically, rather, exploring the possibility of at least some truth in them and how that truth applies to business.

Seriously, what good does it do you or your business to "embrace" another culture if you don't know how to properly manage that cultural understanding for strategic business growth and development? There is an uncomfortable tension here to be sure but I wanted to make you think for a moment.

To be succint, if I had to choose between "embracing diversity" or "managing culture," I would manage culture.

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posted by Ricardo González on February 17, 2009.

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