Diversity is the art of thinking independently together

Diversity is one of the important topics for me and it had a very positive influence on my life, both personally and professionally. Workplace cultural diversity has many benefits and at the same time has its own challenges. I have tried to understand it and shared my own research and experiences on this blog.

Workplace and Diversity

In a journal article entitled "The multicultural organization" by Taylor Cox Jr., Cox talks about three organization types that focus on the development of cultural diversity.

The three types are: the monolithic organization, the plural organization, and the multicultural organization. In the monolithic organization, the amount of structural integration (the presence of persons from different cultural groups in a single organization) is minimal. This type of organization may have minority members within the workforce, but not in positions of leadership and power.

The plural organization has a more heterogeneous membership than the monolithic organization and takes steps to be more inclusive of persons from cultural backgrounds that differ from the dominant group. This type of organization seeks to empower those from a marginalized standpoint to encourage opportunities for promotion and positions of leadership.

The workplace diversity can be categorized into single-gender and mix genders. It focuses on mostly "identity-based differences among and between two or more people". The multicultural organization not only contains many different cultural groups or different genders, but it values this diversity. It encourages healthy conflict as a source of avoiding groupthink

How Diversity was established at Workplaces

Origins : This is a very recent progress we have made as a society. Not sure why it took us so long though. The history of modern workplace diversity can be traced back to the American Civil Rights movement, from where the Equal employment objectives were created. In the 1960’s, social and political changes resulted in the passage of civil rights legislation that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later on, age.

The "business case for diversity" stems from the progression of the models of diversity within the workplace since the 1960s. The original model for diversity was situated around affirmative action drawing strength from the law and a need to comply with equal opportunity employment objectives implemented in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Equal employment opportunity was centered around the idea that any individual academically or physically qualified for a specific job could strive for (and possibly succeed) at obtaining the said job without being discriminated against based on identity.

Next, the social justice model evolved next and extended the idea that individuals outside the dominant group should be given opportunities within the workplace, not only because it was instituted as a law, but because it was the right thing to do. Kevin Sullivan an ex-vice president of Apple Inc. said that "diversity initiatives must be sold as business, not social work." This model still revolved around the idea of tokenism, but it also brought in the notion of hiring based on a "good fit".

When United States implemented these practices with many companies adopting it, this soon got approval and was picked up by other developed nations and by large multinational corporations as well. Soon it spread to the rest of the world.

Globalization and its effects on Diversity

Technological change especially in communications technology has played a crucial role in accelerating Globalization. Deregulation of global financial markets, the abolition of numerous rules and regulations, for instance, rules concerning foreign ownership. As a result of Privatization, businesses were now open to purchase and/or take-over. Changes in consumer tastes and willingness to try foreign goods resulting from the arrival of the global satellite, the awareness among the consumers has increased.

Globalization has made the economy of the world increasingly interdependent. This can be seen in the growth of trade, increase in flow of capital and also a boost in Multinational economic activity. For their macroeconomic health, world economies depend on each other. Globalization will continue to have people with more marginalized communities working in bigger and small enterprises. It is only going to accelerate with more third world countries opening up and becoming the centers of supply chain and manufacturing in the decades to follow. With that, diversity in the workplace is going to increase manyfold too.

My early exposure and experiences of Cultural Diversity

Everyone has cultural biases and I am no exception. I come from a small city in North India called Patna (to be more precise, Central-Eastern India) which is mainly the Hindi speaking region of India (Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English with roughly 340 million speakers) North India's lingua franca is primarily Hindi with many local dialects which adopted Hindi after India's independence and partition in 1947. Although a native Hindi speaker, I could also speak (read and write) English fluently, since I received my school education in English medium schools. When I moved to a different city (Kolkata, the former British Capital of India) for my university education, I came across a slightly different culture and a new language, called Bengali. Bengali is a rich and another important language of North India with approx. 90 million speakers, its one of the prominent regional languages. And it has great literary contributions in India’s history.

The exposure to this new culture and language was initially a bit difficult for me. That time my world view revolved around my native language and the culture I had grown up in. I could not relate to the new customs, norms or some of the perspectives of the new culture. Sooner I realized the new environment was quite different. We had conflict of ideas and decided to take it further with debates and discussions. Those debates ranged from all topics from language to religion, sports, politics, cinema etc. And those turned out to be surprising and a bit shocking for me on many fronts in the beginning. Those days were not easy. Being challenged about your ideas or world views in a very argumentative way was something I was not exposed to before. On top of that the heavy baggage of my own cultural standpoint was making it difficult to think open-mindedly. This led me to start a long process of introspection and researching the basis of any idea or perspective in society. The question I began asking is why we believe certain things and why dismiss other things. Is there always a reason or sometimes its just our biases in play or we have grown up with those ideas and hence we think its true or false.

Looking back in retrospect, now I know it was primarily because my worldview revolved around some fixed ideas which suited my perspective or was limited to the world/culture I was exposed to prior to that. Having exposed to a new opinion or perspective which differed my set point of view was not easy. I had some of the most heated arguments of my life. And initially I even struggled to make friends into my newly exposed culture. Sometimes I was wrong and sometimes others were wrong and sometimes both were saying the same things but in a different context. Having a new way of looking at things was an eye opener. Later the exercise of introspection helped a lot in my personal growth and understanding of the world. It was only towards the third year that I started making more friends from the local culture. I also started questioning many held beliefs and cultural biases and understood the others perspective. I started addressing topics more reasonably and logically. Putting myself in others shoes helped with that a lot. And effectively I am proud to say that I made some of my best friends later in that new culture and some of them are life long friends now.

Workplace Challenges and Opportunities

With Diversity and Inclusion at workplace comes different challenges as well. Interpretation of messages can vary from person to person since no two people have the same experience of events. Cultural biases including prejudice and discrimination is also very common. But I believe this is where managers and leaders need to step in and help with these things to ensure that everyone is included and respected no matter where they come from. And everyone can contribute and rise regardless of their backgrounds as long as they match the vision and objectives of the organization.

As the world continues to be more globalized than ever before, we will continue to have people from different cultural backgrounds and different nationalities and ethnicities working in more bigger cities around the world than ever before. This will result in opportunities for companies to embrace diverse talents in the workforce and help capture even more diverse markets for their products or services In fact, most world cities and corporations have already accepted this very well and embraced immigration, workforce diversity and many other benefits that come along with it as long as they can balance and prioritize locals in the workforce. Other cities are learning fast and doing this continuously. And Hong Kong is no exception when it comes to workforce diversity. It has always embraced people from different background/nationalities to come and settle in HK (because of their merit and the skills they bring along) and contribute in whatever capacity. In fact that's the reason its called Asia's World City.

In the short span of my professional career I have myself seen firsthand the challenges and benefits that come with managing a diverse team. And this has certainly shaped me and the values that I stand for today. I have been struggling in my early days of working in a diverse team and had my own biases. But having previously been exposed to diverse cultural exchanges in my university days and having learnt to respect the difference of opinions and perspectives, it helped me enormously to overcome those biases easily. And over the years working with different leaders and people from different cultural backgrounds and different mindset, it has now become clear why diversity is so important and how I have realized to value it more than ever now. I have no doubt it's one of best things that can happen to our teams and our organizations, in general. Provided we take care of each member of our team and ensure we have inclusive practices in place so that everyone feels they can be heard and they feel they can contribute and rise while having the psychological safety around. Having my own diverse team to lead, learning everyday from my people and our collected and shared experiences is what I try to do in my organization. The aim is always to learn and do better.

One of the articles from Harvard Business Review rightly points:

"Though you may feel more at ease working with people who share your background, don’t be fooled by your comfort. Hiring individuals who do not look, talk, or think like you can allow you to dodge the costly pitfalls of conformity, which discourages innovative thinking." I try to practice this and has become one of my lifelong guiding principles.

In a nutshell, enriching your employee pool with representatives of different genders, races, and nationalities is key for boosting your company’s joint intellectual potential. Creating a more diverse workplace will help to keep your team members’ biases in check and make them question their assumptions. And most important if we put a variety of world views into one room, and we are sure to come out the other side with better ideas.