How do you ensure your organizational culture benefits from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your workforce?

In struggling to answer this Baldrige Criteria question, most of the companies I’ve worked with do not have an aggressive plan to benefit from the diverse thinking of their employees. They typically have a diversity policy and they seek ways to attract and retain employees from diverse backgrounds, but they are not as aggressive about parlaying that diversity into making their organizations stronger.

In “What a Physicist Taught Me About Leading Change” (HBR, October 6, 2010), change guru John Kotter notes that, when he helps an organization form a team to guide a change, he advises “that people who really want to help make the change happen are included in the group that guides the effort, and that they have relevant diversity on many dimensions: education, functional background, leadership or managerial skills, credibility in different parts of the organization, relationships with people at the top and bottom, access to data at the top and bottom, age, tenure in the organization (old-timers and new).”

This is not a common approach. Most teams are formed around similar positions (senior leadership teams) or similar roles (department teams) or similar interests (process improvement teams) without giving much thought to making those teams more diverse. “Yet the benefits of this sort of diversity can be amazing,” writes Kotter, adding that “people will have vastly different sources of information, vastly different sets of relationships, and vastly different perspectives on any issue.”

This is not a comfortable path. Most of us prefer to be on teams with our peers, our friends, the person in the next-door office, the people in our department, but as Kotter and the Baldrige Criteria recognize, the comfortable path will not produce the amazing results that a diverse team can provide. Benefiting from diversity means more than hiring diverse employees: It means throwing those employees together on your most critical teams to see if they can discover innovative solutions.

To read more about diversity, click on these articles:

• 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
• Making Your Organization Adaptable
• Backdoor Access to World-Class Performance
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• 4 Parts of True Sustainability

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