Andres Tapia is the Chief Diversity Officer and emerging workforce solutions leader at Hewitt Associates. He is responsible for leading the company’s internal and external diversity vision and strategies and has created several groundbreaking and high-impact diversity learning and multicultural marketing programs. His insights into how varying worldviews can impact health, wealth, learning, safety and workplace performance are captured in his new book, The Inclusion Paradox: The Obama Era and the Transformation of Global Diversity.
Thomas Freeman, the New York Times columnist, likes to say the world is flat. In the context of our work, both U.S. and globally, I wouldn’t say the world is flat. I would say the world is really upside down. We have to keep this in mind as we drill down into the next generation of diversity work that we need to do. Let’s talk about the ways in which the world is upside down:
An African American is U.S. president.
Who would have thought even just a few years ago that that would have been possible?
To be young is to be experienced.
That with technology and also just growing up in an uncertain time, which for Millennials is just the way the world is, it’s Boomers who are less ready for this world and its changes than Millennials.
To be a minority is to be a majority.
In 50 U.S. cities already, minorities are the majority. We have to change the term minority.
To be a woman is to be rising in opportunities.
Even though the glass ceiling is firmly in place, the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that Hilary Clinton referred to are very real and they have weakened the glass ceiling. Now we have two-and-a-half generations of women in the workplace, not only in the workplace, but in management and with no patience to wait longer given the experience and education that women have gotten over this time. The pressure against the glass ceiling is increasing. And we are now seeing more women than men graduating with advanced degrees and undergraduate degrees.
To be disabled is to be differently abled.
What does it mean to be disabled? In the Olympics it was someone without a leg running the 100-yard dash. On my blog I wrote about a company that just hires people with autism because they have to do quality checks and they have the capacity to focus and concentrate in a really almost obsessive way on following the thread and the inconsistencies that they need that ability. So what is disability after all? How many of us can do that kind of attention to detail and be accurate and then lead to profitability for a company?
To be an economic superpower is to be a declining power.
We’re experiencing that in the moment. Growing up in Peru, my paradigm was developing country: instability,uncertainty, hyperinflation. The U.S. was developed, stable. Now the tables are reversed. Regardless of one’s political affiliation, it is a time of greater instability here politically. One vote can decide many things, huge things. We’re still coming out of this recession. In the meantime, Peru has had an 8 percent Gross National Product growth even through the global recession.
Americans are the locals here.
I got a call from a multinational Indian consulting firm and they said, “We’re having problems with our locals. We’re having problems attracting them and retaining them, and engaging them. We’re having a diversity issue.” So I’m trying to think who might the locals be in New Jersey. It turns out it was the Americans. This Indian company was being very Indian culturally. In fact, that is what had led to their success to go global. Yet as a multinational in the U.S., that very thing was leading them to be ethnocentric in their preferences in a way that wasn’t attracting local talent or retaining or engaging.
Newspapers are becoming obsolete and technology is not a tool, but a way of life.
So in a post 9-11, post Boomer, post American, post modern, post economic boom world, how do we prepare our leaders, our employees, our organizations? That’s the question that we’re really wrestling with.
We like to say in the diversity field that one of the business cases for diversity is that we need the greater mix. And it was said here by a colleague at Leo Burnett that we need to stimulate creativity to stimulate innovation, to spur sales, to be a differentiator. Diversity is one of the ways to do that. But the data is contradictory.
We like data that says greater diversity leads to greater innovation and creativity. But there is other data by other reputable academics that people who oppose diversity actually like to quote. That no, greater diversity leads to less creativity and more dysfunction and less productivity.
[Intercultural communications expert] Milton Bennett said,“I have to resolve this. These are reputable scholars on both sides, but they seem to be contradicting each other.” He figured out the “Eureka.” Here’s what he figured out:
If you look at the bell curve here, the middle is monocultural teams as the benchmark, and in fact, multicultural teams underperform or outperform monocultural teams. The question is, what was the difference? The difference was that multicultural teams managed well outperformed monocultural teams–that when diversity was addressed
in a very explicit way, when we took into account those things below the waterline that get in our way, when that is addressed, when you build cultural competency, then you do achieve the promise of diversity. Diversity by itself, organically speaking, left alone, just because there is a mix of people, actually underperforms.
This is key. This is what’s happening in our corporations. This is why we have greater turnover of diverse employees, because it’s not being managed well. We like to say that we need each other’s diversity, but we don’t know how to leverage it. And that’s where I believe we need to have cross-cultural competence.
The Inclusion Paradox
One of the legacies of Diversity 1.0 is that it’s based on the paradigm of the power system, and I feel it’s run its course. Once you’ve had the international potluck, put away the dishes and turned off the music and you’re looking across at someone very different than you, all the tolerance and all the sensitivity in the world will not give you the answer to “how do I deal with this person?” It’s also limited because it’s a very U.S. concept. As soon as you take it outside of the U.S. borders, it is recognized as American. So it doesn’t work when you’re trying to do global diversity.
The limitation of the tolerance paradigm is, who is the implied audience? Who is it that needs to be more tolerant and sensitive? It’s a white, heterosexual male. He’s in that room saying, “I get this, this is all about me, but I’m not part of it.” Right there with the inclusion training you have exclusion going on.
That’s why we have to shift to this paradigm. We’re still being tolerant and sensitive. But we also have cultural competence. With competency, we have observable skills and behaviors that we can actually train people in: beginner, intermediate, advanced. You can embed it in performance management systems. You can reward or not reward people against it. It gives you a global platform. I’ve done it in Brazil, Latin America, Europe, India, Canada and this works. Is this about making the mix work? Yes. And who is the implied audience? It’s all of us. So the white males in the room say “I get this. I need it and so does everybody else.” So now we can have an inclusive journey as we go into this new upside-down world.
