Climbing Above Base Camp on Diversity and Inclusiveness

From base camp in Nepal, explorers aiming for the peak of Everest must first cross the Khumbu Icefall. The crossing requires many resources to be brought together, some personal and some organisational. Ladders, crampons and guides complement vision, experience and courage.

My sense is that in the field of inclusion and diversity many organizations and individual practitioners are struggling to get beyond base camp onto higher slopes. Of course, being at base camp is in itself something to celebrate. People are paying attention, capabilities are increasing and some results are flowing. But, in order to have a dramatic impact on organizational and personal success we have to move higher.

What then are some of the resources needed for ascending the diversity and inclusion slopes? A few come quickly to mind. I suggest we may need them to be available on the mountain.

Nexus for Knowledge and Needs
A tremendous amount of academic research is undertaken with important implications for inclusion and diversity practice. Many of us don’t have the time to review, filter and pack all the nuggets into our rucksacks. Neither can we sustain active connections with many of the thought leaders in the field to influence their direction. I believe real value would flow from creating and resourcing an active nexus connecting the organizational and academic worlds.

Learning Opportunities
If we are honest, a lot of inclusion and diversity practitioners are ‘enthusiastic amateurs’. Many come from business backgrounds. While that perspective is on one hand a great asset, it is also a potential limitation. I was fortunate to learn from gifted mentors and then picked up more knowledge on-the-job. However, a practical curriculum of learning related to inclusion, diversity and organisational development would be valuable to many amateurs – even ‘gifted’ ones.

Business Language and Tools
Most organizations have chosen performance assessment and measurement systems. They create a language and tools with which many leaders and employees are familiar. To illuminate the strong connections between diversity, inclusion and performance it makes sense to use the common business language. We should take the time to convert the value proposition for diversity and inclusion into our local languages of performance.

Peer Challenge
Every diversity leader I interact with could spend their working lives responding to benchmarking requests. How many of those ‘opportunities’ would really drive improvement in our performance? In my view the answer is very few. We need to look for a whole new level of mutual challenge over diversity and inclusion performance.

Rose Tint Removal Kit
As key advocates for diversity and inclusion, practitioners can at times be their own worst enemies. If balanced advocacy turns to what is perceived as zealotry, we lose credibility among the stakeholders. We have to be ready to raise and discuss the real challenges as well as the benefits that diversity creates. When that honesty is part of our process I feel better about our credibility and our platform for change.

Accredited Consultants
More and more consultants see diversity and inclusion as a money making proposition. That’s true both for people with and sadly those without the capability to serve clients effectively. In Europe, where attention to diversity and inclusion is increasing particularly rapidly, there are relatively few world-class consultants. We would benefit from some form of accreditation that separates the genuinely knowledgeable from the opportunists.

With these and many other personal and organisational resources we can get out of base camp and head a lot higher. Pack up – let’s go!

Women Matter

“At the time I got to meet one or two good women marketers. Most marketers I’d met [until then] were men. What I started understanding very quickly, as I worked with them [the women], is because we were in the diet market, it was only women who really understood women engaged with dieting. It didn’t matter how intellectually smart and how brilliant a marketer you were, as a man you didn’t fully connect with dieting. At the time they’d taken a really bright guy and put him in charge of marketing for the US. When you looked at the way that the insights were pulled together, the way they were driving the marketing thinking, it was completely chalk and cheese. That was because you’d asked a guy to work out how women’s minds work on dieting, versus a woman”.

This is an extract of a recent conversation I’ve had with a senior leader in a food company. I use it to illustrate just one of the ways in which business leaders are beginning to link gender diversity to the performance of their organisations. In my view there are many other situations where the presence of women in organisations can directly tie to performance. We know that more women than men have an empathetic mindset for the challenges faced by others. This feminine characteristic, which of course some men demonstrate, is a potentially powerful aid to profitable new product development. While the masculine mindset is attracted by the challenge of building a great widget, the feminine mind is more likely to scan the environment for widgets that people need and will pay for. Both mindsets are needed and a more profitable future depends on having both.

McKinsey have recently published a report on the value of women in organisations called Women Matter. Mirroring other reports by Catalyst it presents evidence for the positive impact women at senior levels are having on the performance of organisations.

Map and Manage the Impact of Diversity

There is a straightforward process a team can use to look at the way differences impact their ability to deliver results. The work is all about understanding:

1. Which differences (kinds of diversity) are relevant to what they are trying to achieve and
2. The impact on performance of the differences concerned - both desired and actual.

When the mapping is complete it creates the opportunity to manage diversity in a way which can most help the team succeed.

If we use an R&D team as a working example, what would we actually do?

1. Define the real Success Factors for the team
This helps ground the diversity thinking in the everyday needs of the team. Most of the success factors will have real implications for including and managing diversity.

2. Relate Success Factors to Diversity needed in the team
For an R&D team, having many different options to get to a solution is probably important. So the team should be familiar with different experimental methods, have wide knowledge of solutions to similar problems, have broad external connections and diverse problem solving approaches. For each success factor - we can identify what kinds of diversity should really make a difference.

3. Understand other Important Differences in the team

There will be other differences in the team which may not be relevant to the task but can still impact performance. An example might be age, nationality, physical ability. It’s helpful to know what these are.

4. Map out Relevance and Impact

Use a simple tool like this to build a picture of the way diversity plays out in the team.


Make a map of what it would look like in the ideal case and then one which is an honest picture of the current state. Involve the team (and other people if appropriate) to build the picture. Overlaying the two will identify opportunities for action to improve the team’s performance.

At worst, those differences with low task relevance should have a neutral impact on performance. Those differences with high task relevance should be managed in a way that they have a positive impact on performance.

5. Highlight Opportunities and Make Improvements

An open appraisal of what is wanted versus current reality should identify the key issues needing to be addressed. Take the example below. Here are two instances with major differences between needed (in green) and actual (in red).

With this kind of “mapping” done - a team can begin to look at ways to improve performance. It may be through building greater diversity of some kind or breaking down barriers which some differences are creating.

Diversity is not a black box. If we use some simple tools and open minds it’s possible to work out how it operates in our teams.

Want help in using this kind of approach to understanding the impact of diversity? Contact me here.

Connecting the Dots on Diversity

“We just didn’t connect at all. I got my sales pitch ready based on the little bit I knew about the buyer. It was a woman in a Turkish company and I convinced myself I knew what was needed. A Turkish company? I thought ‘low-tech, not very sophisticated’. A woman buyer? I thought ‘she’ll be focused on our customer service, not much interest in technology’. I only got through the first minute or two of the sales pitch before she stopped me and said ‘ look, what I really need to know is what's different about your technical solution and what makes it the best fit with our needs’. As I quickly discovered - all my assumptions were wrong and so was the sales pitch. The buyer was a leader in research and development and the company was putting together really sophisticated technical solutions for their own clients. The whole thing was a disaster. She wasn't convinced that we had good enough technology and looking back, I think she felt insulted by my approach.”

Not long ago, I was told this story by a rather humbled salesman. It illustrated how easily our assumptions about different individuals, cultures or organisations can stop us creating effective and profitable connections. This is a powerful, business-focused way to look at diversity.

What Connections Deliver to a Business

Through effective connections we:

· respond to the needs of diverse customers,

· attract recruits in the face of fierce competition,

· motivate and retain different employees,

· form joint ventures which deliver value,

· source and lead successful teams

· leverage information and talent globally

· move into new host communities easily and confidently

ll these outcomes (and many more) rely on interactions between individuals, teams or organisations. Every connection is unique. Not only because the purpose may be different but also because of the diversity (differences) among those who need to be connected. Businesses that excel in connecting diverse stakeholders will have a sharp competitive edge.

Approach Diversity Pragmatically and Enjoy Better Connections.

So what does all of this really mean for leaders? Clearly, stakeholder connections are critical to business and personal success. What may be new for many is the discipline of working out how diversity affects those connections. The way forward is the intentional integration of diversity and inclusiveness into the business. This should not be treated as a separate issue but made part of mainstream operating practices.

The full article these extracts come from is here.

Does More Diversity Lead to More Innovation?

There are few rigorous, published studies linking diversity and business performance. Many of them don't go beyond correlating the degree of diversity in teams and their performance. The truth is that simply increasing diversity in a group, while taking no other action, has unpredictable consequences. We know that differences among team members can create barriers to effective collaboration as well as creating the potential for better outcomes. When everything else in the environment is the same, there's no clear business benefit to having added diversity.

Two studies I've come across recently start to unpick what diverse teams need to make them outperform more homogeneous ones. Both are in the area of innovation. What they highlight are "X Factors" which enable certain kinds of diversity to be translated into higher levels of innovative output.

One of the studies is Networks, Diversity and Productivity: The Social Capital of Corporate R&D Teams by Reagans and Zuckerman; Organisational Science, Vol 12, No 4, pp 502-517.

Some highlights:

· 220 corporate R&D teams were studied to see whether mixing people who’d been with a company for different lengths of time made a difference to productivity.

· Productivity was measured by looking at outputs including experimental materials and new patents.

· Actually, the diversity alone had neither a positive or negative effect on productivity.

· Inclusive teams (with frequent connections between the members) achieved significantly higher productivity than teams lacking that kind of culture.

· Inclusive teams that also had diversity were even more productive.

· The study's authors point to the different sets of contacts, information, technical skills and experiences this kind of diversity brings to a team.

For me, inclusion and inclusive leadership is all about thinking and acting in ways which optimise the impact of diversity (differences) in an organisation. I see diversity as potential energy which makes generates value only when we put the conditions in place for it to be used effectively.

There are many version of the picture below which tries to show the impact of good leadership / management on diverse teams. It seems there is an increasing body of evidence to back this picture up.

It is potentially a wasted investment to build diversity in an organisation without considering the X Factors, such as inclusive behaviours among peers, which unlock the value in that diversity.

I'm happy to share more insights into those X Factors. Find out how to contact me here.

An Elevator Speech on Inclusion

What if you have very little time to describe Inclusion in a business context, like in the lift - what could you say?

Perhaps this might help:

You need to talk diversity first!
Everyone working for an organisation has to interact with people who are different from themselves.

Then the impact of the diversity
When people interact the differences are going to have an impact. That could be positive if say, past experiences, are used to develop new solutions. On the other hand it could be destructive if differences like seniority cause people not to listen to one anothers ideas.

Then Inclusion
Inclusion is about optimising the impact of diversity. Important outcomes are at stake. Individual contribution and satisfaction as well as the capability and cohesion of teams can all be impacted, positively or negatively, by differences.

There are three keys to success:
• our attitudes
• the processes we use and
• our personal behaviours

There is no one-size-fits-all template for inclusion. In each situation we need to work out:
• What outcomes we want
• How diversity could impact the outcomes and then
• What specific attitudes, processes and behaviors will ensure the best outcomes?

If, for example, the outcome we want is to capture every possible idea for improvement from a diverse team we would need:
• The attitude that everyone,regardless of role and background can contribute.
• A process for gathering ideas that doesn’t create barriers for anyone e.g. technology that is
accessible by all.
• Behaviors that encourage contribution, like active listening or drawing out introverts.

Diversity, by itself, does not guarantee better results for an organisation. The opposite may be true. But diversity WITH inclusion creates the potential for teams to outperform in areas such as Innovation. More on that in a post to come.