Diversity 

Reinventing Diversity
By Howard J. Ross
Rowan and Littlefield Publishers/SHRM, 2011
289 pages
List price: $29.95
ISBN: 978-1-4422-1043-1

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Why do most diversity programs fail? According to author Howard J. Ross, it’s because they lack any real ways to measure their success. Myth and misinformation dog them. Companies do training or celebrate some diversity events and think their diversity commitment is fulfilled. Or diversity is seen as corrective, punishing past mistakes without changing anyone’s mindset.

Reinventing Diversity is Ross’ plan for changing organizational communities so that diversity is an ingrained part of corporate culture, rather than a program or project.

Ross looks at the foundations of cultural competency, defined as “effectively operating in different cultural contexts” and altering practices in order to reach different cultural groups successfully.

He details basic principles including defining culture, recognizing complexities of language and interpretation, working with community and cultural groups, and much more. He outlines how organizations need to incorporate cultural competency into their policies, administration, practices and services. The book offers specific ways to support employees’ development of cultural competency.

Only by understanding our own perspectives and how we got them—our “wiring,” as Ross calls it—can we learn to manage our own unconscious biases. He presents nine steps for uncovering and handling your own biases, exploring biases both as individuals and as managers.

Ross finds that too often, organizations focus on doing something about diversity—holding training programs, marking events such as Black History Month or having diversity recruitment drives. Instead, they should first focus on understanding the systems they have in place now and how those affect diversity.

Readers learn the key elements of an organization or workplace as a community, as well as how those elements affect diversity. Do the workplace’s values support its diversity efforts? Are people kept “in the loop,” and do they all get the information they need to do their jobs? How does diversity affect the ability to serve customers?

Ross also presents a dozen building blocks of culture in organizations, including the organization’s focus, its leadership and structure, feedback processes (and how well they do or don’t reward behavior), and relationships, which may or may not be diverse.

Next, Reinventing Diversity guides readers toward creating cultures where diversity is ingrained. Ross’ “organizational community change model” helps leaders evaluate, understand and then change their organizations so that diversity and inclusion are part of their values and cultures.

The model encourages leaders to ask specific questions to probe the organization’s existing culture and its historic experiences with diversity. Leaders learn to examine recruitment, interviewing and hiring for bias and diversity. Ross shows how benefits, such as domestic partner benefits or time off for religious observances, reflect diversity commitment. Leadership behaviors, mentoring and coaching, and community relations also are viewed through the lens of how they reflect or affect diversity.

Other steps in the community change model work on developing trust with people of different cultures, building a structure for holding people accountable for diversity goals by using metrics and educating people in the organization about the new diversity model.

Field Tested: Recruiting, Managing and Retaining Veterans
By Emily King
AMACOM, 2012
186 pages
List price: $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-8144-1779-9

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Field Tested is a guide to building a veteran-friendly organization. Author and consultant Emily King aims to teach employers three things:

• How to use veterans’ strengths effectively in the workplace.
• How to anticipate and handle the challenges related to the military-to-civilian transition.
• How to position veterans for success as employees.

King provides her Military Transition Model, a tool to help hiring managers and HR smooth the way for employees making the military-to-civilian move. The follow-up is her Veteran Retention Lifecycle, a tool for adapting recruitment, onboarding, performance management and career development to veterans’ needs.

Veterans provide loyalty, values, discipline, leadership and accountability, King says. But they also experience cultural whiplash when they enter the civilian workforce. Cultural differences range widely, from the simple—what to wear each day, when you’ve been wearing a uniform for years?—to the profound: In the military, mission drives everything, but in business, “mission” tends to be less concrete and driven by profit, King notes.

A key skill for managers of veterans is translating the civilian workplace culture. King offers a four-step translation process, teaching managers to break down key concepts, such as teamwork or leadership, into practical meanings and specific behaviors. These steps help veterans understand what can seem like fuzzy ideas to them after a career of concrete tasks.

A section on the common challenges of the military-to-civilian transition identifies the top five challenges veterans face in the workplace:

Organizational difference. Veterans are unused to having a dollar amount associated with their output and unused to a work context where their employment is voluntary. Veterans may find that the command-and-control leadership style that worked for them in the military backfires in the civilian workforce.

Interpersonal style. The terse, direct, impersonal style that often characterizes the military can be misinterpreted and damaging in the civilian world.

Leadership and management philosophy. This philosophy is clear and mission-driven in the military but often not clearly articulated, or driven by a less clear-cut mission, in the civilian world, King says.

Ambiguity of the nonmilitary workplace. Veterans may expect structure and clarity not necessarily present in their new offices.

Attrition. King finds that many veterans leave their first civilian job within 36 months and that it may take two job changes before a veteran finds a civilian organization where he or she fits.

The book walks employers through the stages that veterans undergo as they move into the civilian workforce. Initial detachment—and defaulting to “military style” that can harm work relationships—is typical, King says, and she offers coaching tips for helping get new-hire veterans through this stage.

A second stage, regrouping, moves the veteran toward balancing the focus on mission with a focus on relationships at work. In the third stage, integrating, the veteran is able to accept new ways of working while still using the strengths learned in the military.

Key steps in recruiting and hiring veterans include how to interpret a military resume and how to phrase job interview questions in ways that translate for veterans. For performance management, managers will need to explain their metrics to veteran hires and have to help veterans recognize what feedback looks like in the civilian sector.

Transformational Diversity
By Fiona Citkin and Lynda Spielman, GPHR
Society for Human Resource Management, 2011
168 pages
List price: $34.95
ISBN 978-1-586-44230-9 

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An expert traveled from his corporate headquarters in North Carolina to deliver a presentation to a prospective customer in New York. But the expert’s “leisurely” style and Southern accent turned off his audience and jeopardized the contract.

That incident led Fiona Citkin and Lynda Spielman to create a diversity program focused on the differences among communities and cultures within the United States—and how business people in one region can communicate better with, and better understand, those in another region.

Diversity today is about far more than race or gender, and multiculturalism is as much a part of the American workplace as it is a part of the global workplace. Traditional corporate diversity programs no longer “fit the bill” with employees and managers who are weary of them, Citkin and Spielman say.

In Transformational Diversity, the authors push for change, moving toward practical actions and a culture of inclusion. They advocate “intercultural business competencies training” and identify five imperatives driving a need for change in diversity programs:

• Both global and domestic diversity programs need to focus on the increasingly multicultural workforce.
• To compete for talent, employers need to establish cultures of inclusion throughout their organizations to make new, multicultural hires feel loyalty rather than isolation.
• Employers need to educate employees about inclusive behaviors—behaviors the authors say don’t come naturally.
• In a time when companies have been laying off workers, training in transformational diversity could help reduce “layoff survivor sickness” among remaining employees.
• Social responsibility mandates that employers do business with the wider world in mind, and increasing inclusiveness in the workplace does that—especially in places where the community has issues with inclusiveness.

The book’s core is its customizable tools for turning the idea of transformational diversity into an employer’s tailored diversity program.

These six tools, called “action archetypes,” give users structure and content for building a new program. Each action archetype includes goals, recommended participants, a list of specific content, formats for learning such as classroom sessions or lunch roundtable talks, and more.

Among the action archetypes for employers to adapt are these:

• America the Diverse examines the country’s increasingly diverse workforce and the combination of commonly held American values with the cultural and communication challenges of working with different groups and in different regions of the United States.
• Communicating Across Cultures focuses in part on inclusive communications skills, cultural awareness of groups in a diverse environment and productive work with a culturally diverse team.
• Diversity Coaching is aimed at new executives or new team leaders in diverse organizations and focuses on assessing their leadership capacities and coaching them to develop their managerial styles, with an emphasis on improving the global scope of their decision-making.
• The book also touches on issues such as building teams across cultures, choosing technologies appropriate for diversity training, and more.

World Class Diversity Management: A Strategic Approach
By R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010
List price: $32.95
289 pages
ISBN: 978-1-60509-450-2 

Author and consultant R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., calls for a universal framework for diversity management, a framework that employers can use to handle any diversity issues across any organization. Too often, he says, HR and other organization leaders understand what diversity means but don’t know how to translate that understanding into decisions and choices.

To help make the leap from understanding to practice, Thomas created the “strategic diversity management process” outlined here, and he guides readers through four core strategies:

• Managing workforce representation, with a focus on getting to “a desired numerical workforce profile with respect to race, gender, ethnicity” and other aspects of diversity.
  
• Managing workforce relationships, including accepting and valuing new and different employees and creating a climate free of tensions, where everyone can be productive.
  
• Managing diverse talent, “however it comes packaged in terms of race, gender and ethnicity.”
  
• Managing all diversity mixtures, not only those of race and gender, but also of behaviors, attributes and more.

The strategic diversity management process is a tool to help management make decisions based on these strategies.

First, leaders need to know the context of their decisions. What is the organization’s mission and business strategy? What is required for the organization to meet its mission and address competition?

Second, leaders must understand the diversity mixture—the individuals, groups and organizations with which they’re dealing, and the interests and priorities those players have. Third, Thomas’ strategic diversity management process helps leaders assess the tensions in the organization, looking at the sources and costs of tension and where the diversity challenges lie.

Fourth, leaders learn to identify the outcomes they want, the obstacles blocking those outcomes and ways to get problems resolved. Finally, leaders learn to identify possible responses to situations, examine pros and cons, assess which options offer the best possibilities for success, and more.

The book includes a case study of a CEO facing diversity challenges who applies strategic diversity management principles. Thomas illustrates the choices, options and problems this CEO, a composite of several real people, encounters.

Compiled by Leigh Rivenbark, a freelance writer and editor in Vienna, Va.