Evolving Approaches to Diversity: Weaving a New, Stronger Fabric

There are many ways to build diversity in a for-profit company or nonprofit organization. Some ways are more pervasive, and beneficial for all involved, than others. To better understand the potential of deep diversity and inclusion, there first needs to be agreement on what the process of inclusion should achieve. What does an organization that embraces diversity look like?

According to an article in Harvard Business Review called “Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity,” diversity has evolved through time as companies have come to better understand the value of fostering a diverse staff. Baseline conceptions of diversity still prevail in many companies, the article notes, such as anti-discrimination policies and promoting fairness in hiring practices. However, there have been moves toward deeper engagement of diversity that have led to a series of shifts in the way companies include new people and the new ideas they bring. The lessons are readily applied to nonprofits.

Fairness and Equal Opportunity

The first approach described in the article is the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm, which is often still the dominant conception of diversity. That is, leaders focus on the need for equal opportunity, fair treatment, recruitment and compliance with federal Equal Employment Opportunity requirements. The essential thrust of this approach is to eliminate prejudice from the workplace and to promote an understanding of cultural differences. The goal, as described in the Harvard research, is essentially to achieve recruitment and retention numbers. “The staff, one might say, gets diversified, but the work does not,” as authors David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely put it.

There are benefits to the discrimination-and-fairness approach. It increases demographic diversity and promotes fair treatment. However, the authors argue, the assumption of this approach is that employees are all the same or all aspire to be the same. “Under this paradigm, it is not desirable for diversification of the workforce to influence the organization’s work or culture,” the scholars point out.

Respecting Differences

The second concept of diversity is the access-and-legitimacy paradigm, which came about in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of growing business competition, the authors explain. In this paradigm, diversity—as the saying goes—”just makes business sense.” The focus is on the acceptance and celebration of differences that could include, for example, a team of employees tasked to increase sales with a niche-market demographic to which they themselves belong.

While tapping the many segments of potential customers (or donors) is critical, the authors note that the access-and-legitimacy approach does not acknowledge the benefit of employees’ cultural uniqueness to the company as a whole. They write, “access-and-legitimacy organizations tend to emphasize the role of cultural differences in a company without really analyzing those differences to see how they actually affect the work that is done.” Furthermore, leaders using this paradigm “are too quick to push staff with niche capabilities into differentiated pigeonholes without trying to understand what those capabilities really are and how they could be integrated into the company’s mainstream work.”

The example raised is a U.S. company that brought together a team of Europeans to carry out business for the company with France. The team was highly successful, but the senior executives of the company later admitted that if they lost that team they would be in trouble because they had no idea what made the team so successful working with the French. “We assumed—and I think correctly—that culture makes a difference, but that’s about as far as we went,” one executive said.

Another obvious problem with “pigeonholing” is that employees feel exploited. They are thought of as useful only for only a specific niche and not useful to overall company effectiveness. The authors note, too, that in the access-and-legitimacy approach, the motivations for diversity are immediate and crisis-oriented.

“Once the organization appears to be achieving its goal,” the scholars point out, “the leaders seldom go on to identify and analyze the culturally based skills, beliefs and practices that worked so well … or consider how the organization can incorporate and learn from those skills, beliefs or practices in order to capitalize on diversity in the long run.”

Full Circle: From Equality to Respect of Differences—to Integration

The new approach to diversity is the learning-and-effectiveness paradigm, which has been developed by organizations seeking to make the most use of their own pluralism (a group’s range of ideas, skills and approaches). Here, diversity is seen as a process of building relationships and sharing strategies and approaches to become more successful at reaching shared goals, be it in a development office, a for-profit company, a group of volunteers or a professional association.

This paradigm incorporates—not just tolerates—employees’ perspectives and brings them into the main work of the organization, the authors explain. This “enhances work by rethinking primary tasks and redefining markets, products, strategies, missions, business practices and even cultures.”
The newest paradigm is effective because it not only promotes equal opportunity and acknowledges cultural difference, but also integrates the differences among employees. In other words, everyone’s perspective matters.

As the article states, “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.”

To illustrate, the article describes a law firm that hired a Hispanic female attorney with the intent to better reach Hispanic clients and also show its commitment to diversity, but ended up benefiting a lot more. The female attorney suggested cases that the all-white firm had not before considered taking on or deemed relevant to its mission. The attorney explained that a link existed between the new types of cases and the cases the firm handled regularly. The firm has now pursued precedent-setting litigation challenging English-only policies, which is linked to the firm’s mission to handle affirmative-action casework.

Integrating new ideas and new people, “managing diversity,” is no easy task, but it can improve an organization to its core—even giving its mission a wider meaning.

Eight Steps Necessary to Better Integrating Diversity

1. The leadership must understand that a diverse workforce will embody different perspectives and approaches to work, and must truly value variety of opinion and insight.
   
   
2. The leadership must recognize the learning and opportunities as well as the challenges that the expression of different perspectives presents for an organization.
   
   
3. The organizational culture must create an expectation of high standards of performance from everyone.
    
4. The organizational culture must stimulate personal development.
    
5. The organizational culture must encourage openness.
    
6. The culture must make workers feel valued.
    
7. The organization must have a well-articulated and widely understood mission.
    
8. The organization must have a relatively egalitarian, nonbureaucratic structure that promotes the exchange of ideas and welcomes constructive challenges to the usual way of doing things.